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Salt Mines & Big Brother. For the adventurous tourist with more time and money, there are now 100 open cities to choose from. Easily reached by plane from Moscow are the workers' Black Sea health resorts of Odessa, Yalta and Sochi, with their pebbled beaches, plump bikinied women and soft Mediterranean climate. Five hours by plane from Moscow are the ancient Asian cities of Tashkent, Samarkand and Bukhara, with beautiful mosques and colorful bazaars. Northeast of them lies AlmaAta, a 20-year-old planned city that is the capital of Kazakhstan. The Siberian scientific center of Novosibirsk was opened to foreigners last year and tourists who wish to go farther out can go on to Irkutsk (8 hours from Moscow). There they can visit Lake Baikal, the world's deepest. One taste of its pure waters, and one will thirst for them for life. Or they can ask to see salt mines, which the Russians will gladly show them—they are all automated now.
Distances in Russia are vast, and planes are the dominant mode of travel for tourists, who complain that many of them seem to be converted bombers, with inadequate air conditioning and pressurizing—and that the pilots bank too sharply. Where the cities are close together, a train ride is worth it for the experience of traveling in a deluxe "soft seat" car, at the end of which there is always a samovar of hot tea warmed by live coals.
For the unhurried tourist, there are trips by steamer, excursion boat or hydrofoil on the Volga and Don rivers from Kazan to Volgograd to Rostovon-Don, along the Dnieper from Kiev to Kherson, up the Neva from Leningrad to Petrodvorets. For the most part, tourists report that the equipment is modern and the service excellent. Says Pomona, Calif., Attorney Graham Talbott, who took his wife on a six-day cruise down the Danube from Vienna to Yalta: "The only annoying aspect was a Big Brother speaker over your bed that never quit issuing orders from the time it woke you up at 7 a.m. There wasn't a switch to turn the blasted thing off."
The ABCs. Apart from scenery, architecture and art, there are also glimpses of the formidable Soviet system that Americans have talked, read and worried about for more than a generation. Some U.S. visitors feel that they are embarked on a bold expedition. "Hello, there, everyone," one American chortled cheerfully as he walked into his first Moscow hotel room. "If anyone was listening," he confided later, "I just wanted them to know I was friendly." Most visitors leave convinced that rooms are no longer bugged, nor do they have any sense of being followed. They all agree, however, that plans should be made well in advance, and a plan once made should be adhered to. The Soviet travel bureaucracy takes a dim view of impulsiveness.