Trip to Karelia in July 2020. Highlights
Late June still felt like the aftermath of a strict lockdown, with car passes and barely any chance to go anywhere, and yet we were already preparing for a trip to Karelia. Where else could we go? Flying did not seem appealing at all, you never know who might be sitting next to you. That left only our own car. But where could we drive? The borders were closed, so only Russia remained, and the choice was limited: either south or north. We thought the south would most likely be overcrowded, so we decided to go against the flow and head north instead. It was also much faster for us to get there than to the south. Driving south takes 2-3 days, while driving north takes only 1 day.
Preparation
We started by preparing a map with the points we wanted to visit. Three clusters emerged: Sortavala, Petrozavodsk and Kem. There is a lot to see around each of these areas, so that is where we decided to go. I also checked the hotel situation in those regions. It turned out to be rather poor, with very few options available. I do not know what caused that. Possibly many places had closed because of the coronavirus. Or perhaps accommodation has always been this scarce there. In one YouTube video they actually mentioned that this is a common problem in the region. It is hard to understand why. If there is a flow of tourists, why not make a business out of it? Because we might have had to sleep in the car, we decided to take all the necessary camping gear with us: a tent, sleeping bags and cooking equipment. In the end, we did not have to stay at campsites, but we did use the gas burner exactly once while driving from Dubna to Petrozavodsk. We had brought cold meat dishes with us, and we needed gas and the burner to heat them up. We were somewhat afraid to eat at canteens because of the coronavirus, and it was not even clear whether they were open at all.
Places
The whole trip took us only 7 days, and not because we were short on time. It was simply because we managed to see everything we wanted within that period. Our sightseeing pace is fairly intense, so that is how it worked out. As for the locations, we first visited everything around Petrozavodsk. Then we planned to move towards the White Sea, but the weather caught us off guard, and if we had gone there, we would have had to sit around for 3 days waiting for the weather to improve, in the most literal sense. In the end, we gave up on that destination and drove to the Sortavala area instead, and then headed home, stopping in various places and staying overnight near St. Petersburg.
Accommodation
We had only 3 overnight stops: Petrozavodsk (3 nights), Sortavala (2 nights), and the Sampo hotel located 100 km north of St. Petersburg. There were no problems with accommodation in Petrozavodsk, more precisely with the apartment, because we had booked it in advance, about 1-2 weeks before arrival. Even then, however, there was hardly anything to choose from. The apartment turned out to be quite nice: a small studio with a bed under the ceiling, a cedar barrel sauna, and an underground garage. We looked for a hotel in Sortavala just 1 day before arrival, and there was almost no choice left. We even had to book it for only one night instead of the two we actually needed. But I assumed we might be able to arrange a second night on site, and that is exactly what happened. At the Sampo hotel we stayed for only one night while already heading home. The hotel was located right by the highway and was very convenient. We arrived there late, having barely managed to visit everything we wanted to see. The next morning we left early so that we could still visit some sights in St. Petersburg and drive back to Dubna using the high-speed toll road.
Trip cost
It turned out to be rather expensive considering it was only 7 days, but spending the summer sitting at home was not an option :-)
| Expense type | In rubles |
| Hotels | 18 050 |
| Activities | 16 600 |
| Fuel | 8 000 |
| Food | 5 600 |
| Toll roads | 2 100 |
| Groceries | 2 000 |
| Ferries | 470 |
| Total | 52 830 |
Mileage
In total, we drove 2870 km. If you subtract the first and the last day, when we covered a lot of distance driving from Dubna to Petrozavodsk and from St. Petersburg back to Dubna, that leaves 1057 km over 7 days, which is quite good. If we had gone south, 2800 km would have been only the round trip there and back.