Valaam, a beautiful holy island about a hundred miles from Saint Petersburg, is Svetlana's favorite place in the world. She has lived there and worked as a tour guide there. I wanted to see this place with her, but after we got back from the Urals we had only a few days left together before I would have to fly away back to New York. But Svetlana managed miraculously to find us a couple of tickets on the overnight boat to Valaam.
      We took off from Saint Petersburg around nine in the evening on July 24. Around midnight the boat left the calm Neva and started across choppy Lake Ladoga. We arrived at Valaam around breakfast time the next morning.

      I have many nicer photos of us on Valaam — of Sveta by the wild high seacoast that reminded me of Point Lobos south of Carmel, of Sveta picking tsvetiy (flowers) and travkiy (grasses) and zemlyanikiy (wild strawberries) — but I have not been able to get them scanned.
      This one was at a viewpoint near Ascension Chapel, I think — one of the great many chapels and churches on this holy island. Behind us is a bay leading out into Lake Ladoga.

      A little further on was this lovely deep lake— an hourglass-shaped thing called Konevsky Lakes— where Sveta and her son Sergey used to go swimming every evening when they lived on Valaam. A lone man was swimming here now, and, though we were supposed to be back at the boat in fifteen minutes for dinner, she was sorely tempted. So we hurriedly pulled on our suits and went for a brief dip in the dark deep water.