Another day at sea is not so bad

Yesterday we had an unscheduled day at sea. The previous night as we were sailing towards Yalta, our next scheduled destination, the captain announced that a crew member had suffered a serious accident and we were heading back to Istanbul for an emergency helicopter evacuation. We would therefore not make it to Yalta as scheduled but would skip Sevastopol the following day and go to Yalta instead. This resulted in an additional day at sea, most of which we spent working on reworking the tour to the village of Balaclava and the Valley of Death (site of the famous Crimean War battle inmortalized by Tennyson's poem "The Charge of the Light Brigade"). This is after all a cruise to the Black Sea and this was a very important part of it for us.

The Crystal tour desk team came through for us (and six others) and organized an even better tour out of Yalta which would take us to the Valley of Death and the Village of Balaclava but also to a most amazing former Soviet submarine base built in Balaclava during the cold war, which is now a museum. The base was built to withstand a nuclar attack and provide shelter to thousands of members of the Soviet elite for a period of up to three months. It was so secret that during the cold war the name of Balaclava was erased from all maps of the Soviet Union. Although no submarines remain, piles of bombs, mines and torpedoes are everywhere.

Rock of Reconciliation - Valley of Death

Battlefield in the background

Monument to the Russian Soldiers

Schematic of the submarine base in Balaclava

Submarines entrance

Anti-nuclear attack doors

Arsenal

Submarine batteries

Unrestored tunnel

The Crimean mountains form an impressive background to the town of Yalta, a favoured summer place of the Russian aristocracy during the 19th century. After the tour we went back to Yalta and had an opportunity to see the town, including Nevsky Cathedral, a precious gold-domed orthodox church. We enjoyed a walk along the wide seaside promenade; full of music, colour and beach-goers.

We made our way through a street market where produce stalls competed for space with sidewalk petshops; we saw the plaque conmemorating Franklin D. Roosevelt's participation in the Yalta conference of 1945 - a conference that resulted in the restructuring of Europe post World War II, and we bought fresh Ukrainian pastries. Yalta was lovely.