Two days before the ship sailed from Venice, the Captain
told me that our next port will be Novorossiysk. Novorossiysk was a port in the
USSR, (as it was called at that time) situated in the Black Sea. According to
the Captain’s advice, I planned the passage to Piraeus in Greece first, as the
ship was calling there for bunkers and then sail through the Bosporus Channel,
via Istanbul to Novorossiysk.
The ship sailed from Piraeus on the 9th of June 1976 and
arrived at Novorossiysk on the 11th of June. As it was summer, it was really
good to be there. All officers and crew were paid one month's wages on arrival.
As usual the wages were paid in US dollars. If anyone wanted, part of that could
have been drawn in Rubles, the USSR currency.
Our wages were paid by the Purser, Peter. The two of us
did not take any Rubles. Rules and regulations were very strict in USSR. To
proceed ashore, we had to have a shore pass with our photograph attached to it
and endorsed by the Port Immigration. There was an Army guard at the gangway on
24-hour duty. Anyone going ashore must return by mid night, as there was no
shore leave after that until 8.00 a.m. On the first day itself Peter and I went
ashore. We did not have any local currency, only US dollars. As we came out of
the gate (main entrance to the port) we saw some people waiting in a queue with
bottles and cans to buy beer. Beer was being distributed from a cart fitted with a
tank. This was something new to us.
We walked towards the city and came in front of the main
Post Office. There we stopped and tried to talk with a few people and found
that again the problem was the language. We had our standard questions, such as
where we could find a place for a drink, to eat and listen to some music. One
gentleman stopped and although he listened to us, it seemed that he did not
understand much. So Peter as usual with his sign language conveyed to him what
we were looking for. He signaled us to follow him and boarded a bus which came
into the nearby bus stand. He paid our bus fare. After about a ten-minute bus
ride we all got off and he took us to a nice hotel, the Hotel Leningrad. There
we had to buy tickets to enter and this man bought that, too. Later, we came to
know that he had paid 10 Rubles for both of us. We were so thankful to him and
were very guilty as we did not know how to return the money. We asked his name
and he repeated it a few times which neither Peter nor I could understand. The Russian gentleman left us there and
walked off. Both of us walked in and went upstairs. There was a nice sitting
area on the balcony. The ballroom and the bandstand were on the ground floor.
There was live music and the band had already started. After finding a table
with a good view, we settled down there.
Part of the port of Novorossiyks
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