Dnieper ‘uninteresting’

I read with interest the subscriber’s article “Cruising Ukraine’s Dnieper River” (May ’11, pg. 48), regarding her experience with Viking River Cruises. My now-deceased wife, Lois, and I cruised the Dnieper in May ’09 aboard Unique World Cruises’ M/V Dnieper Star.

The passengers on our ship were mostly German and Russian. The ship was great, we saw and experienced most of what was described in the article, and the stops were as good as the writer described, but I felt obliged to expand on a single, rather understated comment: “This was the first time we began to understand that in following the Dnieper, we would not be viewing quaint villages and charming castles against a riverine backdrop.”

Including on the Danube, Volga, Mekong and Nile, Lois and I took many cruises together over the years, the last on Holland’s and Belgium’s canals in March 2010, and with our prior experiences of seeing plenty of villages and castles near and far along the cruise routes, we were greatly disappointed as we cruised south from Kiev to discover that the Dnieper is so very wide and flat and the relatively vacant banks are fairly distant and uninteresting. And this effect gets more pronounced the farther south you go.

I offer this merely as a caution to others who may not appreciate the difference between the Dnieper scenery compared to that of other river cruises.

EVERETT ANGELL
High Ridge, NJ