I seem to be spending my life underground on this Spirit of Adventure cruise in the Black Sea. On Saturday in Odessa I was down in the catacombs under the city, seeing where resistence fighters lived during the Second World War; on Sunday I was in tunnels dug after the Second World War to hide a submarine base in Balaklava, just outside Sevastopol.
Yes, the very same Balaklava made famous for the Charge of the Light Brigade during the Crimean War, so we learned all about that too while we there.
The history in this area is fascinating. Odessa, I was surprised to discover, is a very elegant city, best known for the Potemkin Steps - 200 steps that lead from the city to the harbour that featured in Eisenstein's film Battleship Potemkin.
It was great to see them, and I walked up and down them, but the catacombs are far more interesting - 2,500km of mad-made tunnels (it's where they took the limestone from to build the city) that would stretch from Odessa to St Petersburg if laid in a straight line.
Up to 250 resistance fighters lived for a year in the tunnels we wandered through under the town of Nerubaiskoye, coming out at night to blow up German trains, trucks and garrisons. Because they lived underground, they were very pale, so they had to make themselves up before they went out on sabotage duty or the Germans would easily spot them.
Nest day I was in the submarine tunnels - much bigger obviously as they had to hold a nuclear sub. These are the stuff of James Bond - I could just see Daniel Craig racing through them, blowing everything up as he went. Or maybe that was wishful thinking.
The tunnels were dug by brigades, which each did their bit and were then sent away - shot, I suggested, but Mariya, our guide said no - so no one knew the full extent of them. She reckons the people of Sevastapol, just down the road, didn't even know they existed.
The subs and nuclear weapons have all gone now - after all this area is now the friendly Ukraine, not the Russian bear (you don't even need a visa to visit). And anyway, the subs got too big to fit in the tunnels and no one had any money to expand them.
Jane Archer
