Sortavala and its surroundings. Days 4 to 7 of the trip

July 29, Wednesday. Even though we only had to get up at 8 a.m., it somehow did not go smoothly. We had probably walked a lot yesterday, so we still wanted to sleep. I looked out the window. The weather was cloudy, with a light drizzle. In that mood we started getting ready. We had a long drive ahead of us from Petrozavodsk to Sortavala. Sveta cooked some fish soup for the road. I went outside many times to throw out the trash and carry all our things to the car. Around 11:00 we finally set off towards Sortavala. The first place on our way was a village with an interesting label hanging around its neck: the most beautiful village in Russia. The first house there was built in 1960. I think there are villages in Russia that are older and prettier, so this one could be called rather young. Since it was somewhere halfway between Sortavala and Petrozavodsk, it took us a long and tiring time to get there. Rain kept alternating with the faint sun showing through the clouds. The road was of excellent quality, like the Kola highway. I am not sure, maybe it actually was the Kola highway. We reached the turn to Kinerma, and that was where the bad road began, about the same as the road from Petrozavodsk to the quarry. We drove into Kinerma and did not even notice when we had already driven out of it. We had to turn around and take a closer look at what we had just passed.

Sveta got out of the car and went for a walk, while I stayed inside. Those old houses were not particularly interesting to me, and in my opinion this village was no different from any other village. Sveta heard some guy approach other visitors, call himself a personal guide, and start telling them things about the village. Sveta quickly retreated back to the car and we drove on.

Our next stop was supposed to be a waterfall. We barely found it, but there was nothing interesting there. The waterfall looked kind of dirty. We found another waterfall nearby. It was a bit better, although in reality it was nothing special either.

After that we walked around in the forest and found some blueberries. Then bikers and a huge ZIL truck with seats for tourists started arriving there.

Next we started looking for a place where we could eat our fish soup waiting in the trunk, but for some reason we could not find a suitable spot. We decided to first drive to our next point, the garnet quarry. We ended up in some backwoods. There were vegetable gardens and local houses there, and on one of the houses we read a note saying that there was no quarry where we had arrived. It also contained detailed directions on how to reach it from there.

We found the place. It turned out we had already passed it, but we did not think it could be the road to the quarry because there was some trash lying nearby. When we arrived, we were not even sure that we were in the right place. We found some kind of rock, but it was unclear whether it contained any garnets. In the end, tired of all the driving around, we simply set up our chairs and table right there and started heating our fish soup on the gas burner.

After we had eaten, we started exploring the area and found another spot where it was clear that someone had once chipped away at the rock. I pulled out the hammer and chisel I had brought in advance and started breaking off pieces of rock, and almost immediately we found some dark purple inclusion in one of the broken stones. We realized that this was the garnet.

Before that we did not even know what garnet looked like, and I had not thought to look it up online. We started chipping away at the rock, but then I realized that at this rate it would take forever, so I decided to look for stones right under our feet instead. There were plenty of broken rock pieces lying around, and after checking them we found quite a lot of garnet inclusions. We collected those stones in a small bag so that we could extract the garnets later in Dubna when we had time. This is what the garnet we found looked like:

It is quite brittle, by the way, and sometimes it is hard to extract it without cracking it. While we were busy with the stones, the sun came out and it got hot. We wanted to find every stone there was. Greed took over us, and we kept eagerly picking at the rocks. But then some cracking sound in the forest startled us. We thought it might be a bear or some other swamp creature, so we hurried back to the car with our loot from mother nature.

We drove on. By then we already wanted to check into the hotel, so we decided not to make any more stops. In the end we only stopped at one field that Sveta liked. There were lilac flowers there. I took some photos of her, and we headed towards the hotel. On the way I noticed several interesting spots and a little restaurant on the lakeshore. We arrived in Sortavala. Check-in at the hotel went smoothly, the room was ordinary, nothing interesting. But, as I said, in reality it was not worth 4,000 rubles. On the Canary Islands, I remember, we once had such a great room for 5,000 rubles with a panoramic mountain view that I did not really want to pay that kind of money here for this sad place. But we had to. We even had to pay twice as much, because I arranged with the receptionist that they would keep it for us for the second night as well, although at first they said they were fully booked.

The moment we started carrying things from the car to the room, heavy rain began.

July 30, Thursday. The alarm went off, and it was time to get up because we needed to reach Ruskeala as early as possible. It is an abandoned marble quarry turned into an attraction for tourists. I started boiling hot water for the road in our little electric kettle, then we got our things together and went to the paid breakfast. The cafe was attached to the hotel and had a distinctly Soviet feel to it. The waitresses did not really look like waitresses, and the menu seemed not to have changed for years. We placed our order. We had to wait a long time for them to prepare everything because groups come there, and sometimes they do not have time for individual guests.

We left the hotel and drove towards Ruskeala. On the way in we somehow ended up on a small road running past gardens and old houses, and we had already started to doubt that we were driving the right way. But in the distance we saw a large complex, and when we approached it, a security guard came up and asked whether we were going to Ruskeala. When we nodded yes, he said we had arrived in the wrong place and needed to turn around and follow the car that had turned around and left before us. We rushed after that car because it was the only one that possessed the secret route. In the end we got back onto the highway and drove another 2-3 kilometers. We found the correct turn, the one we would have reached right away if I had analyzed in advance where we actually needed to go. Fine, we arrive and see a huge parking lot, a relatively small number of cars, and quite a long line at the ticket offices. We put on extra clothes and went to the ticket office. While waiting, we took turns going back to the car and putting on even more warm clothes because it was fairly chilly. While standing in line, we also figured out what tickets we needed. In practice it was two tickets: entrance and a boat. We bought them and walked on, but then realized that maybe we should have bought two boat tickets since there were two of us. So we kept walking and wondering whether we should run back and buy more tickets. But since our boat was booked for a specific time, we continued towards it. In the end everything was fine. One ticket meant one boat, not one person in the boat. We got in and started rowing in turns. This is what the quarry itself looks like from our boat:

And the most interesting place to paddle into was these grottoes:

While we were rowing around, the captain of one of the ferries that run there from time to time swore at us. I do not even know why those ferries are needed at all when the boats are much more interesting.

Another thing we liked there was passing by a huge rock that was mostly submerged under thick layers of malachite-colored water.

While we were out on the water, several times people zipped above us on a cable from one side of the quarry to the other. They call it a trolley there. A thought started creeping into my mind: why should we not ride it too? We got out of the boat and went to take pictures. While taking photos, we agreed that we should go for the trolley ride after all. We asked the price, and it was not too expensive, only 1,200 rubles. Sveta went first, and I went to the position from which I could photograph her. Then she took my spot and I went for my ride. It was all very quick, and I even managed to hold my phone in my hands while flying. Here I am riding it:

After the rides we went for a walk around the park. We did not find anything particularly interesting. We also wandered somewhere away from the quarry. There was a place where you could see how marble had been cut. After that we returned to the parking lot and were amazed: the whole thing was packed with cars, and it was unclear where all those people were. Yes, by daytime there were many more people in the park than in the morning, but still not enough to match the number of cars. Fine, we drove back towards Sortavala. On the way we noticed a cluster of cars, turned around and drove there. We parked and went to see what it was. It turned out to be the Ruskeala waterfalls. Entrance there was paid. We bought tickets and went in. Everything was arranged quite nicely. Suspension bridges had been built over a series of small waterfalls, and it was fun to walk across them.

Somewhere there we read a theory about why the water can have such a dark brown color. It said that water gets this shade when it is rich in iron and contains humus.

So, after walking around for a while, we drove on. We had planned to visit a mountain. We drove back to Sortavala and then 10-20 kilometers in the direction of Petrozavodsk. We had not had time to visit this place yesterday. As usual, once we left the highway the road became bad. We reached the point and met some guys there who looked exhausted. I immediately thought they had just come down from the mountain. I asked them where it was best to go up and how difficult it was. They told me in return that they had made it to the top, but were unable to come straight down because they had lost the path, so they had wandered for a long time while descending, even through some risky places. Thanks to them, Sveta and I drove to the place from which the climb was supposed to start. I opened the map in MapsMe and we set off. In fact, we only went the wrong way once, when it was unclear which way to go, but in the end we still found the correct path. About 25 minutes later we reached the summit:

There was also this cave next to the peak:

At first I did not pay much attention to it. I thought it was natural. There were people standing nearby, so we found a relatively quiet place and sat down a little farther away. While we were sitting there, Sveta called her parents and I dug around in my phone. Then a man passing by asked me where the grotto was. I answered that maybe there was none at all. He walked away, and I started looking for information online and found that the grotto was apparently on the western side. Then I went looking for it. I checked every relatively safe place and still found nothing. But then I heard voices coming from the cave. It turned out there really was an entrance. One of the voices belonged to the same man who had asked me about it. A few minutes later he came back up and told me how to get there. I went down, and Sveta took a picture of me from above:

After that we went down into the cave together. It was damp and dark inside.

We spent quite a lot of time on the mountain, but eventually it was time to leave. As a final shot, I captured a rainbow somewhere in the distance:

We came down and drove towards the hotel. On the way we stopped at a restaurant I had noticed yesterday. It turned out to be a fish restaurant. Almost the entire menu there was fish-based. Of course, it was risky to eat in public places during the coronavirus period. But the nice thing here was that we were sitting outdoors in a separate gazebo. We ordered lots of food, ate until we were full, and drove back to the hotel without stopping anywhere else.

July 31, Friday. Around 6 or 7 in the morning people started stomping around and talking outside the door as if it were already noon. I do not understand people who behave as if they are alone on the planet. Since I was awake anyway, I lay there for a while reading the news, and then we started getting up and packing. We had a fairly short drive ahead of us to our next place to stay. I think it was about 200 kilometers away. We had no exact plan for the day. We got ready and went down to the canteen for breakfast. Today we did not have to wait. We arrived on time, and the crowd started coming in only when our food had already been served. We ate and took the croissant that Sveta had ordered with us. Then we went back for our things, and after that I carried all our belongings to the car. We set off, and the first thing that came to my mind was that we should go to the pier and find out what there was to do in this town at all. We arrived. Sveta stayed in the car while I went to look at the advertising board. Then, unexpectedly, I heard some man offering a woman a tour of the Ladoga skerries. She told him to get lost, but I approached him myself and asked about the tour. It turned out he had a personal boat and took groups of 4 to 8 people out himself. This is what the boat looked like inside:

So we agreed with him to go in an hour. He said another couple would also join. In the meantime, we decided not to waste time and went to some supposedly interesting spot in Sortavala. But the weather was not great, so in my opinion we did not see anything especially impressive. Here is a gazebo. Maybe it is cool:

We drove back to the pier. The captain had already brought his boat over, and the couple he had arranged to take was already getting in. We got in too, and a few minutes later two more girls arrived, and we set off.

That day, as our captain told us, the weather on Lake Ladoga was not very good, and they had even cancelled the hydrofoils to Valaam. But on our boat we had nothing to worry about because we were not going out onto open water. We were moving through the skerries, and they keep the water from getting too rough. We passed some kind of estate. According to the captain, it was the mansion of one of Putin's friends who had latched onto the Russian budget. We also passed near Winter's mansion. I do not know who that is, and I am not interested. We also passed by a cruise liner. The captain told us that these ships stay there because they cannot approach Sortavala due to the shallow depth. So if people need to be taken off the ship for an excursion in Sortavala, they are brought by hydrofoil. In any case, our route led to some small island among the skerries. There the captain dropped us off and led us somewhere toward the center of the island. We thought that only he knew this place. Here is a photo from that peak:

Sveta and I walked around the area there and eventually wandered so far that we realized our tour neighbors had already gone back towards the boat, while we still had to cover that distance. We hurried back, but then I heard voices. They were not our fellow passengers, but people from another tour, and I had even seen some of them at breakfast in the hotel that morning. Somehow we made it back to the boat. It turned out there was still time, so we stood there for a while admiring all those skerry boulders. After that everyone boarded and we headed back to Sortavala. By the way, that excursion cost us 3,000 rubles for the two of us.

The bad part was that the sun started coming out only when we were on our way back. If we had gone on that trip in sunnier weather, it would have been much more interesting. Fine, onward we go. Somewhere inside the town we found a Rosneft gas station. We stood in line for a long time. Apparently there is a shortage of gas stations here, and this sort of rush is always the case. We filled up and drove on. Along the way we started looking for a place where we could stop and have a snack. In the end we found no such place. We simply stopped in an open field and ate the croissant we had taken with us from breakfast. We kept driving, and although we were not exactly hungry anymore, we came across a snack bar that looked tempting, and Sveta wanted to have coffee there. So we stopped. I could not resist either and ordered pancakes with jam. That turned out to be a mistake because a wasp kept bothering me while I was trying to eat.

Our next stop was something called Mount Filina or something like that. We got there and realized it was all about military themes. We turned around and left.

After that we had no more planned points, and all that remained was to drive to our next hotel, but there was still plenty of time, so while driving I started looking in MapsMe for something else we could see. I found some waterfalls, so we headed there. About 50 kilometers later we had to turn off. The road became dirt, though not too terrible. We kept going and at some point saw an interesting place. There was a girl sitting at the entrance. We asked her about it. As it turned out, entrance was paid, 150 rubles per person. We paid, parked the car and went for a walk. The girl said the walk would take about 15-20 minutes, but it took us longer. It felt good there and we did not want to hurry. The attraction was a small river with a few rapids. In reality there was nothing extraordinary there, but everything was arranged so well: a sturdy staircase down into the valley, and a bench by each rapid. We simply relaxed there.

At the very end, when we decided to look for more viewpoints, we left the trail and met a man who asked us whether there was anything farther ahead. We said no, and he left. We slowly walked back to the parking lot. There we saw him talking to the girl at the entrance about something. We drove on, and then had two options: either go back or drive a little farther ahead and look at another waterfall. But we did not know what kind of waterfall it was or whether it was interesting. In the end we decided to go anyway. The road kept getting worse. About 2 more kilometers on the dirt road and we reached the place from which the waterfall could be approached. Getting there was not easy. The path was unprepared, but we managed, and once there we found only one couple, who quickly disappeared as soon as they saw us. This was the place:

We stood there for a while admiring a not particularly interesting waterfall. We were about to leave when the same man we had met at the previous place appeared. We started talking. We told him where we had been. It turned out he was a tour guide looking for places he could bring groups to. He gave us several useful tips about Karelia and said that farther along from there we should drive to a church that was worth seeing. We checked the map and it looked rather far away. At first we thought we would skip it, but then we changed our minds and went. The road was, of course, unpleasant. I do not like dirt roads that have recently been graded. As we approached the village, we noticed a man with a flat tire. A local was helping him. There were many stones lying on the road, so puncturing a tire there was easy, but we got lucky.

Farther along we met our new acquaintance again. He had already reached the church and was driving back. We talked to him for a bit through the car window, then said goodbye and drove off in different directions. And here it was, the abandoned church:

As far as I understood, nothing had been done to it since the start of the Russo-Finnish War. We walked around it and then discovered a staircase leading upward, so we climbed it. But everything upstairs had been boarded up with plastic, apparently to keep the church from deteriorating. There was also a big bell hanging there.

We came back down and drove on. We still had to drive another 8 kilometers back along the dirt road. As usual, on the way back I started speeding up. Then we realized we might still stop somewhere else. We found some place on the map, but in reality we only wasted time. There was nothing interesting there. Then we stopped at a store, and after that at our hotel, which was called Sampo. That was also the name of the mountain near Petrozavodsk that we had visited and not liked. The hotel, however, was calm and quiet, as if no one were staying there. At the entrance they gave us slippers, but we used our own, the ones we always carry with us. In the morning I asked one of the staff why it was so quiet there. He replied that the hotel was actually full, it was just quiet because the guests were normal people.

We took care of our usual things and went to bed.

August 1, Saturday. We woke up. In the morning it was quiet, nobody was walking through the corridor or talking loudly, or at least we could not hear it. We got ready slowly. Loaded everything into the car, handed the keys over at reception and left. It was morning and felt a bit chilly. We were heading to St. Petersburg, but that day we decided to visit only a few places. In practice it was just two places: Kotlin, not the programming language but the island, and Catherine Park. Kotlin was first. I set an approximate point on the map and, in principle, did not miss. We arrived near some abandoned fort, then walked out onto a path leading to the Gulf of Finland. There was a beautiful beach there. There was also a viewing platform, which we climbed:

We did not go farther along the beach, and it was impossible to drive there because, apparently, there was a military facility farther on.

After that we drove to another part of the island. Even though the island seems small, it still took us about 10 minutes. But there was nothing interesting there. The only thing you could really appreciate was how huge the gulf was:

Mainland St. Petersburg was very far away.

We left the island and headed for Tsarskoye Selo. We found some kind of free parking there. It was not clear whether parking there was even allowed. At our own risk we left the car and went to look for Catherine Palace. At the ticket office they told us there were no tickets to the Amber Room, and that they could only be bought online, and even then 10 days in advance. So we bought ordinary park tickets. I had been there a very long time ago, probably in 1997. We walked around a bit, bought cabbage buns, and later regretted it because we found a great restaurant in the far part of the park. There you could eat cheaply and well, which is exactly what we did. After that, in the pastry shop there, we bought some sweets and continued strolling through the park:

There were quite a lot of people there despite the coronavirus. We basically walked all the way around the park and left it. After that we decided to take a shortcut back to the car through Alexander Park. There we found some interesting swampy canals:

We got back to the car, sat down and drove off to find a gas station so we could fill up properly before entering the toll highway. We found one, filled up and kept going. At the entrance to the toll road we got a ticket and drove on. It said we had 480 kilometers to cover on that highway. Yes, that is a lot. Along the way we probably stopped 2 or 3 times. Once we stopped to snack on the croissants we had bought in Catherine Park.

While we were driving, the weather kept changing: first heavy rain, then sunshine again.

After leaving the toll road, traffic jams began. I had already forgotten what traffic lights were and that sometimes you have to press the brake pedal. Then the navigator almost sent us to Tver again, and after that we turned toward Konakovo and safely reached the ferry to Dubna. There, however, we had to wait because it was letting ships pass.

In the end, we were home.