Can anyone recommend decent street maps for these cities? We'll be on a riverboat cruise in May (not RS, but never fear as we will be doing the Best of the Adriatic with RS) and will have free time in Moscow and St. Petersburg and want to sightsee on our own rather than go back to the boat and wait around until the next meal is served. We've used the laminated Streetwise maps in other European cities but I have not been able to find them for Russia.
Thanks for anything you can recommend.
Hi Ellen, if you go to Barnes & Noble website.....there are street maps of Moscow and St. Petersburg by Knopf Guides Staff.....Moscow ISBN #0375710868.....St Petersburg ISBN #0307264475. In the search box if you enter the ISBN # it will come up.
There are Streetwise maps for both of those cities... or at least, there were 4 years ago when I last bought them.
For Moscow, be sure to grab a map of the Metro underground. It's by far the quickest and most efficient way to get around the center of Moscow. Don't bother with street-level transportation, the traffic is atrocious.
Also, as Steve said, be sure to get any necessary immigration documents sorted out. It's not very likely, but the police do stop people for random ID checks, as all Russian citizens are technically required to carry their internal passports/IDs.
(I'm from Moscow, by the way, and still visit every few years)
This does sound silly- but do make sure that your maps have the names in Cyrillic as well as English. The vast majority of streets are only labelled in Cyrillic. We were there with Lonely planet maps that were only in Roman letters and had to translate them into Cyrillic. Needless to say, it was not easy.
Just a FYI -
STREETWISE has not published any maps of cities in Russia - yet. Both Moscow and St Petersburg are on the list of Maps To Do, but there is no firm date for publication.
Thanks, everyone. We have our visas, or at least we sent our passports out to get our visas a month ago, and I will look at B and N for the maps as well as pick up any freebies I can find once we land.
Ellen - per Robin's suggestion I actually ordered the Knopf maps/guides for both cities. They are awesome! In fact, I wish we had these to begin with to help in our preliminary planning.
