What a great day. We jumped in the car and travelled about 30 minutes to Balaklava - the infamous location of a secret Soviet nuclear submarine base. They are doing tours now and I had been looking forward to this for a long time - boys will be boys!

The museum was created after the base become unclassified after the collapse of the USSR. At the same time, so did the financial nature of the Navy and they ceased paying their personnel. In response, they nicked everything.

While the tour was interesting in terms of the engineering involved in building it, it was a little disappointing in the artefacts they had on display - and only a few models of the subs that were based there. Much of the base is still not covered by the tour (80% remains unseen) but you get a fairly good idea. The base can withstand a direct nuclear hit, and support 3000 people for 2 years. In some sense it is amazing, but in another sense they curved the base too much such that you can’t actually get the sub out the back door. They graduated the corner too sharply to get the sub around - so they had to reverse out!

All building and operational work was done at night and all personnel were sworn to secrecy.

Balaklava is a bay that cannot be seen from the open sea and has been a pirate haven, a base for a Genoese fortress and was also the scene for the Crimean war in the mid 1800’s. Its a fascinating place but will be a little Monaco, with massive gin palaces in the marina before too long. Its a great place - but will be ruined by Europe and its tourists.

We also took a boat tour and did some hiking up to the fortress high up on the hills surrounding the bay.

Spectacular - and the highlight of the trip!

Check out the photo’s......