Russia Travel Tips: How to travel Russia in 2025 (Watch before coming to Russia)

Hello and welcome to Tallinn. We are currently in Estonia but this is not our final destination. We are going on an adventure that has been buzzing around our heads for quite some time now. We are going to take the challenge of traveling to Russia in 2025. It won't be an easy thing to do as there are lots of sanctions currently. Russia is the most sanctioned country in the world and therefore also for travelers it is quite hard to travel there and that is the reason why I want to take you with me to prepare you for your own trip to Russia if you are interested in that. We are going to take a bus and travel to Russia by bus, cross the border walking and then end up in the magnificent city of St. Petersburg. Let's go on that adventure together. Traveling to Russia especially from the east is not as simple as it used to be. There are a lot of logistical things you need to know and as we are going to make that journey I'm going to take you along with me and explain you everything you need to know to plan your own trip to Russia based on my experience and my research. There are lots of things you need to know from visa, how to get to Russia, how to book hotels, your flights, money is a super important topic. We are going to cover all of this so that you can make your trip successful. Ever since 2022 there are no direct flights to Russia anymore. That means you will need to take a connecting flight either from Turkey, Istanbul or from Dubai. These are two very important hubs nowadays. However this is also the most expensive option you have. There are further options that are way more affordable and those include border crossings over the land way with buses. That's what we are going to do. The border between Estonia and Russia is a very popular route to take but there's a second one in Kaliningrad in Poland which you can also take. However it is impossible to find direct flights into Russia on web pages such as Skyscanner which is what I am usually using. You won't find anything on there so you need to rely on other web pages that I'm going to link in the description below so make sure to check those out. The next thing you need to take care of is a visa. There are lots of visa requirements nowadays. There are Latin American countries for example that don't need a visa at all but European countries, the US, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, the UK, all of those countries will need a visa. For Europeans it is quite easy to get. The visa process will take four days only and it is an e-visa so it's super simple, straightforward. You just need to fill out a form and then get it directly via email. However you will need an insurance and there's the next problem here because there is no European or international health insurance that will cover Russia anymore at least according to my research. If you know anything else feel free to drop it in the comment section below. So what I did was I got a Russian health insurance that will cover me during my trip. You will need this health insurance for both visa processes even if you need to get a physical visa or the e-visa. Now having the visa and knowing how to enter Russia we will actually figure out together well how this whole process with crossing the border is going to work out. We are going to the bus station here in Tallinn now and take a bus that will take us through the border and to Saint Petersburg. We made it to the bus station and I believe our bus is already there. I will leave you the bus company in the description below as well so if you want to get your tickets. It has cost us 38 euros per person and according to the schedule it is a six and a half hours bus ride. However I've heard stories of the borders. I don't know how long we will really need because some people said it took only a half an hour to get through the border others said it took up to 10 hours so I have no idea when we will actually be in Saint Petersburg today and I'm also not sure if we can take the same bus all the way to Saint Petersburg or if we have to change buses at the border. We'll figure it out together. Let's get on the bus. Honestly I don't think I've ever been this nervous before a trip like literally nervous not excited because I don't know anybody who has recently traveled to Russia and there are still so many open questions but I think this is going to be amazing like seriously I think this is going to be a super interesting trip and I can't wait to get started. We are on our way to Russia. The bus is super empty. There are like 10 to 15 people on here so I hope that is good for us because hopefully this will mean we won't take too long at the border. Before entering the bus they check our tickets obviously and my visa in my case and also they were asking us if we have some food with us. For example you are not allowed to bring either eggs, meat or cheese so if you have that on the bus make sure to eat it before getting to the border and they also asked us if we have euros with us. It's important to know that you are not allowed to bring euros with you if you're coming from a European country. Since we are starting this journey in Estonia we decided to bring dollars with us. Cash is king so yes you will have to bring some kind of money. It is impossible to use credit or debit cards that were not issued in Russia. Due to the sanctions all of these are blocked. They aren't going to work on web pages. You won't be able to pay in supermarkets or go to the bank with them so make sure to calculate your cash. You can subscribe to the channel because at some point I'm also going to create a video to tell you our expenses here in Russia so that you can plan more or less how much money you need per day. There's another option of opening a bank account in Russia but again if you want to open up one you will also need cash to put it into the bank account so in any case it is definitely necessary to bring cash with you as a tourist. There's another option to trade with cryptocurrency and to like place cryptocurrency on a Russian bank account. That could be an option. I am personally not an expert on that so I only recommend you to do that if you know how this works. In any case if you need any support feel free to contact me and I will do my best to support you. We are now in Narva which is the town in front of the border of Russia and we are waiting in line which is super long and I'm going to stop the timer to see how long it will actually take us to cross. We don't really know what's going to happen because the bus driver only spoke Russian I think so we're just going to follow our group and hopefully end up on the other side where there will be hopefully another bus waiting for us. I was very optimistic at that moment but just a few minutes later rumors started to spread that we may not make it across the border on that day. We arrived at 5 40 p.m. and the border would close at 11 p.m. Seemed enough time to me but in the end we were some of the last people who were let through that day. I guess we were lucky because yes it has happened that they wouldn't let people pass anymore. When we were in between the Russian and Estonian side of the border I started to think is this really such a good idea? Am I even doing the right thing here? And what is awaiting me there on the other side? Europe clearly has its standpoint and while I am absolutely against any war I also don't want to judge a whole country by political decisions. Crossing that border was me walking into the unknown staying open-minded despite all we hear in the news and the desire to create my own opinion about a country and its people. I can't believe it as you can notice probably it is dark meaning we took a long time. Five hours and 14 minutes later we made it to Russia. I cannot believe this but we are finally here. We waited on the Estonian border five hours so once we crossed the Estonian border it took us only 14 minutes to do the rest here in Russia and that's it. So yeah the problem is on the European side definitely. I can only again emphasize do not bring euros. There was actually a lady that wasn't being allowed to enter because on the European side on the Estonian side they found a five euro bill in her pocket and with that she had been returned to Estonia. We only have dollars so we are fine. We now have to find our bus. I hope it is still there and then we will at some point today also end up in Saint Petersburg finally at our hotel. Even though we are now almost two hours late there is a bus waiting for us on the other side. I don't know how exactly the system works but don't worry about that there will be a bus waiting for you on the other side. For us it is now two and a half hours drive to Saint Petersburg more or less. It's dark it's late right now it's 11 p.m and we will arrive I don't know not before half past one in the morning so super late. We won't do anything else today just find our hotel and speaking of hotels there are two major web pages where you can make your hotel bookings. The usual ones such as booking.com aren't going to work for Russia. There won't be anything on there so make sure to use one of those two web pages. I personally used Zendesk because there you can pay with your currency and your normal credit card. That was super helpful and it is especially helpful if you do not want to bring a lot of money in cash with you. If you don't want to use that web page you can also talk to the hotel directly and ask them to pay at your arrival in cash. They will most likely accept it. It's quite common currently and it might even be a little bit less expensive because as far as I know Zendesk in your foreign currency will be a little bit more expensive. There is a second option that you can take if you don't want to enter Russia via Tallinn and that is Kaliningrad. We are going to do that when we leave Russia so we will experience that as well and I will also provide you a guide a full guide on my Russian trip so if you need any further details any information and especially all the times and prices for all the buses you can take or flights you can take all the websites and so on all of this information will be in the guide so make sure to check out the link in the description below if you still feel a little bit lost with this whole process of planning your trip to Russia. Tomorrow I will take you with me to a currency exchange place and we will figure out together how we can exchange our dollars into rubles. See you tomorrow! And here we are back with energy and we slept very well we got some nice rest and we are excited to start our first real day here in Saint Petersburg. We arrived here at like 2 a.m and then we had to walk to our hotel. One thing that I completely ignored was the fact that of course we don't have cash so we cannot pay a taxi neither the public transport so we had to walk more or less 45 minutes to get to our hotel. The good thing was that we already had internet and that is something that I would also recommend you to be prepared for. In my case I use an eSIM and this is not a paid collaboration or anything this would just be an honest recommendation as I think it is extremely useful and you also have to remember that here in Russia apps like WhatsApp, Google, Instagram and YouTube don't work so you will need a VPN. The eSIM I have has that included so my internet worked from the first second of arriving here in Russia. I will leave you a link in the description below which will also give you a discount for your own eSIM on your next trip so if you want to use that feel free to do so. Otherwise I do recommend you to get a VPN before coming here if you want to continue to use apps such as WhatsApp. For us it was super helpful because as I said we had to walk to the hotel so I was able to navigate with Yandex Maps which by the way is an app that you should keep in mind and download before coming here it's the Google Maps of Russia and it works perfectly fine here. So now for us it is time to finally find a currency exchange office because we don't have cash still and we are hungry so that's the first thing we are going to do now. We are going to an office close to our hotel. I will leave you a name of the street of an exchange office here in St. Petersburg here so that is supposedly the best office you can find with the best rates of St. Petersburg. We will figure out how the currency exchange works in there together. Mission completed. We've got our first rubles. We've exchanged them in the office here behind me. They are open every day. Today is Sunday so they are even open on Sundays. We've got 8,250 rubles for 100 dollars. Anyway it was pretty straightforward and quick. They exchanged it easily without any problems but make sure to bring dollars or bills in general that are perfectly fine like literally they shouldn't have any marks they shouldn't have any folded corners or whatever because you will pay more for those bills. It is super important to have bills that are impeccable. There will be an extra charge in case there is a folded corner for example or if there are marks and even if you use dollar bills that are older than the year 2006 so make sure to also bring the new ones the colored ones with you to not pay any extra fee on the exchange rate. We are now going to spend some rubles and get some breakfast finally. If you want to join us on the tour through St. Petersburg make sure to subscribe to the channel and I will hopefully see you next week!