Visit Novosibirsk

Visit Saint Petersburg, Russia's imperial capital. See the Hermitage Museum (one of the world's largest art museums, housed in the Winter Palace with over 3 million items), walk along Nevsky Prospect (the city's main avenue with historic buildings and shops), explore the Peter and Paul Fortress (the original citadel and burial site of Russian tsars), and admire the Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood (a 19th-century church with intricate mosaics and onion domes).

The Kul Sharif mosque inside a Kremlin, the capital of Tatarstan where minarets and domes share a skyline.

The Church on the Blood where the Romanovs died, on the border of Europe and Asia in the Urals.

Subtropical Black Sea beaches and the 2014 Winter Olympics venues in the Caucasus above.

The end of the Trans-Siberian, a hilly Pacific port with cable-stayed bridges and Korean-Russian food.

Carved wooden houses of the Siberian merchants and Decembrist exiles, an hour from Lake Baikal.

Russia's oldest city, the 11th-century St Sophia and the birch-bark letters of a medieval republic.

A Kremlin on the bluff where the Oka meets the Volga, and the longest cable car across a river in Europe.