GETTING THERE – A TRAVEL ADVENTURE:
FROM NEW YORK’S PIER 86 TO YALTA’S MARITIME STATION AND INTO THE SOVIET UNION
Presented by Ted Scull
July 31, 2020 @ 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm
The PONY Branch hosted a summertime membership meeting via Zoom featuring a program by Past Chairman Ted Scull. We joined Ted in August 1963 as he set out on an elaborate five-week itinerary, traveling by ship, train, and riverboat from New York to Yalta on the Black Sea, and then onto the Volga and Don rivers and visits to Sochi, Moscow and several other Russian cities.
Ted’s journey began with a transatlantic crossing on Hamburg-Atlantic Line’s HANSEATIC, built in 1930 for Canadian Pacific as the EMPRESS OF JAPAN. After briefly visiting England, he boarded The Night Ferry, a once famous London to Paris sleeper train, and continued eastward on the Orient Express to Prague, then onto Vienna. Here he joined two friends for a Danube River journey aboard a Russian riverboat built by the Austrians as war reparations and bound for a Russian port near the mouth of the Danube. We saw images of Soviet-era shipping and Ted’s port calls in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Romania and Bulgaria. Transferring to a connecting Russian coastal ship for Yalta, Ted then began three weeks in the USSR traveling with friends, a small Intourist group, and on his own. This portion of the program focused on the maritime scenes encountered on the Black Sea and the Volga and Don rivers.
All attending enjoyed a truly adventurous journey by land and water, and a dose of intrigue, during the early days of Soviet tourism.
(Photos: Ted Scull)