Hi

Can anyone reccomend a good road map that covers east to west russia?

Cheers Adam

When i went thru i found it very nessacery to have two maps..one in english and one in Russian. all the signs are in Russian so they are hard to read. and english map gives you half a chance of asking directions. The map BOOK i used was from Stanfords in London...sorry cant remeber the name but if you check the website, you will see an atlas covering all rusia and the fomer states..

Great country...police can be tough
Tim

Unless you need one right now, you can get a Russian road atlas at many petrol stations. Since it is February now, I assume you won't be going for a few months. Use that time to learn the Cyrillic alphabet. It isn't that hard! And if you can read Cyrillic before you go, you won't have to stop and read every sign one letter at a time.

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This is ISBN number for whole map to Russia with cyrillic letters. You could try to find where to by with this number. ISBN-985-409-065-5

Pekka

I totally agree with Chris, spend a few hours to learn the Russian alphabet and get a map at a gas station when you are in Russia, it is not difficult to find a road atlas, although not every gas station has them. I ended up buying a small atlas to fit in my jacket pocket for quick reference during the day, and a bigger, more detailed atlas to pack away in my bag for planning purposes.

Agree with the others above .... going to Russia without learning the Cyrillic alphabet is madness. Its only 32 letters, many are the same as our latin alphabet anyway. It takes less than half a day and will be the best piece of preparation you can do.

If you are passing thru Moscow, there are two places that I have found particularly useful for maps and road atlases over the years. The Moscow book store on Tverskaya is NOT one of them.

(1) Globes, Maps and Atlases, is a little run down old soviet style store in the centre of the city at 9 Kuznetsky Most, 2 mins walk from Kuznetsky Most metro. They have a wide assortment of city maps and provincial maps .... I have found them very useful for maps of individual provinces. There are a number of provinces where the supply of maps is restricted, so you will NOT get a specific map of Sakha / Yakutia ... and maps of Kamchatka and Chukhotka are similarly hard to come by.

(2) best place I have found for the widest selection of ROAD atlases and maps is in an underground bookstore near Krasnye Vorota metro. Walk west along the south side of the Sadovoye Koltso towards Sukharevskaya metro. I cant remember how far you have to walk but you will come to a small modern "shopping centre" (looks like a 4 story modern office block) which when you enter thru the glass doors has an small arcade round to the right and a set of stairs on the left. Go down the stairs and you will find the bookshop. There are few if any signs outside the shopping centre referring to the bookstore down below, but their selection of russian road maps and atlases is around 10 times as large as the Moscow Book Store on Tverskaya. I was in extasy when I stumbled across this place (but maybe I just like maps more than the next man)

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Hello!
Most of Russian road maps to tell lie. One of better choice for good information is a Regional map. Often roads (especially secondary roads, but main roads too) at the borders of districts in bad condition.
Good map collection - Novij Atlas avtomobilnih dorog (The new selection of automobile roads)- it cover all Russia in suitable scale. Publisher - Trivium (Byelarusia) e-mail trivium@mail.ru
Good maps you can by in Riga (Latvia) in map store "Jana Seta" Stabu street, 119 e-mail: kartografi@kartes.lv

Good grip
Martins

Does anyone have any advice or know of a website that I can use to help learn the alphabet?

Russian alphabet - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Learn the Russian Alphabet

Get a Russian phrasebook instead of just looking at the transliteration of the alphabet. They usually have phrases written in cyrillic and latin alphabet, plus a chart for just the cyrillic alphabet. You can see full words that way, and you can take it with you to help you with purchases of all-important supplies like gasoline and .

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+1. It will be very difficult to know how to pronounce anything just by learning the individual letters--much easier to learn the letters, then seen how some basic words are pronounced. Even better if your phrasebook gives pronunciation for city names, but not sure if I've seen one like that.

Perhaps vito smartmap will help you.

It is simpel and cheap (4$) software for PDA/GSM.

VITO Technology - Windows Mobile & iPhone Software

If this website is not updated try google with "Vito smartmap".

Good luck.

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not sure if any good


you can buy maps anywhere very cheap of varying scales and details for $5 upwards and you will need a russian language map as when you ask directions not many people can speak or read english so you need to be able to point where you want to go to get help!!!!

Learn the alphabet, its very easy and phonetic (much more than english)
Plenty in vlad or moscow, People will help you espically of you try to speak
we helped a few people last year in russia ourselves by translating for them
Do not worry about police, just act dumb and no speak russian etc etc
read this very amusing and you can get drunk with russian police and get their guns, you cannot do that in the west!!!
The Wunderlust Logs

I also agree that buying a map from a Russian petrol station when you arrive is the way to go. The one I had also covered all of the former Soviet republics in usable detail too (was about A4, a maroon colour and had a big picture of a new, but very Soviet looking car on the front).

The Cyrillic alphabet takes all of a week to learn when you are looking at it every day, so don't stress about it.

Hen

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I bought the Reise maps but can't remember if it was from Stanfords or Amazon.co.uk but also had a Euromap (ISBN - 13: 978-3-8279-9953-5 or ISBN-10: 3-8279-9953-7) It had all the place names in Russian and English.

I also found that a phrase book (Lonely Planet I think) was invaluable although Kazhak and Ukrainian is different to Russian it still worked as most people understood it.

But the important words are:

Benzine - petrol
Peeva -
Cafe - coffee
Chia -tea

And for when you are hungry and can't figure out the menu or find anyone to help you decipher it then ask for Borscht or Vodka lol