The Urals – World Travel

Yekaterinburg The Urals travel destination

WorldTravelDB.com — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 08:00:00 +0000

From the execution of Tsar Nicholas II and his family in 1918 to the high-profile Mafia killings in the 1990s, Yekaterinburg is notorious for its bloody history. Contemporary Yekaterinburg remembers these events, attracting pilgrims and tourists alike to the sites associated with the Romanov deaths.

As the economic and cultural capital of the Urals region, however, the city offers visitors much more than a dramatic history. The Urals’ mineral wealth is on display in the city’s many museums, while the ongoing economic boom is evident in the crowded cafés and clubs around the centre. Yekaterinburg also has the accommodation options and facilities to serve as a convenient base for adventure activities and winter sports in the Urals.

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Ufa The Urals travel destination

WorldTravelDB.com — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 10:00:00 +0000

Ufa is capital of the self-consciously autonomous Bashkortostan Republic. Although the Muslim, Turkic Bashkir people now make up barely one-third of Bashkortostan’s population of four million, you will hear their lispy language spoken widely in rural areas and on many city radio programmes, along with their curious style of singing. Written Bashkir requires nine extra Cyrillic letters that are absent from standard Russian. ‘Hello’ in Bashkir is hau-ma; ‘thank you very much’ is zur rakhmat.

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The Urals travel destination

WorldTravelDB.com — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 22:00:00 +0000

The Ural Mountains – the celebrated division between Europe and Asia – stretch 2000km from the arctic Kara Sea in the north to Kazakhstan in the south.

The physical reality of the Urals is not as dramatic as it sounds. The Urals are as low as famous mountain ranges go, failing to top 2000m anywhere. Nonetheless, for outdoorsy types the mountains provide endless opportunities – from hiking and biking to skiing and spelunking. Rafting in the Urals is a spring tradition, when the melting snow augments the river waters. Adventurers will appreciate the undulating hills covered with birch and pine forest, and vast stretches of taiga dotted with mountain lakes and rocky outcrops.

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Taganay National Park The Urals travel destination

WorldTravelDB.com — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 21:00:00 +0000

Descriptions of Taganay as the ‘Russian Switzerland’ are – again – a bit exaggerated, but the park’s forested mountains and rocky protrusions are nonetheless splendid. The most convenient starting point for walking in Taganay is the steel town Zlatoust. If you need to stay in town, the lakeside Hotel Taganay(3513-651 225; pr 30 let Pobedy 7; r R700-900; ) is accessible by bus 14.

The national park is dangerous to explore without a guide, as it is not well marked. Ural Expeditions & Tours offers English-language guided hiking trips in the park, ranging from one day to one week. Otherwise, contact the park rangers’ office(3153-637 688) in advance.

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Perm The Urals travel destination

WorldTravelDB.com — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 10:00:00 +0000

Dominated by heavily trafficked avenues and concrete blocks, Perm is a modern, industrial city that most travellers could bear to miss. Its chequered history, however, draws them in to bear witness to the combined thousands of years that were lost by prisoners at the notorious labour camp Perm-36. and to discover what has become of the once-secret city of Molotov (named during the Soviet period for the foreign minister who was also the namesake of the explosive cocktail).

Today, Perm is not as menacing, but its reputation as a bland, provincial capital persists. (Chekhov used Perm as inspiration for the city his Three Sisters were so desperate to leave.) It is unfortunate, as the city boasts its fair share of cultural attractions, from a championship basketball team to the one-of-a-kind Prikamye art collection

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Magnitogorsk The Urals travel destination

WorldTravelDB.com — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 06:00:00 +0000

Like Frankenstein’s monster, memorable Magnitogorsk is a city brought back from the dead, with pr Lenina as its reanimated Stalinist spine. Across the Ural River, the steel mills of the Ordzhonikidze district are magnificently ugly, with snarling, densely packed gangs of chimneys belching dense curtains of smoke in fearfully multifarious colours. This is most photogenically viewed from Park Pobedy, behind the gigantic, 83-tonne, square-jawed colossus of the Tyl Frontu memorial. Over 15m tall, this pair of Soviet archetypes hold aloft an enormous sword, symbolic of the city’s industrial support for the WWII patriotic effort.

The new gold-domed Ascension Cathedral and the gold-spired mosque are anomalies on the otherwise industrial skyline.

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Chelyabinsk The Urals travel destination

WorldTravelDB.com — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 03:00:00 +0000

Chelyabinsk, 200km south of Yekaterinburg, is another city of contrasts – a sprawling industrial town set amid the gentle hills and inviting lakes of the Urals.

Founded in 1736, Chelyabinsk prospered as a tea trading city and expanded after 1892 with the completion of the railway from Moscow. Eventually the trans- Siberian main line was to bypass the city. But expansion continued as its arms factories turned out Katyusha rockets and legendary, WWII-winning T-34s, for which it was nicknamed ‘Tank City’.

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Abzakovo The Urals travel destination

WorldTravelDB.com — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 07:00:00 +0000

In an attractive spot in the wooded mountains between Magnitogorsk and Beloretsk, this quaint village is best known for the Abzakovo Resort(3519-259 300; www.abzakovo.ru in Russian), where President Vladimir Putin comes to ski. (You can thank him for the wide new road from Magnitogorsk.)

As a downhill ski destination, it is among the best in Russia, with 15km of trails ranging from bunny slopes to black diamonds. Lift tickets are R350 to R500 per day or R50 to R60 per ride, and decent equipment is available for rental. The ski season usually runs from November to April.

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