Hands up if you have never heard of Petropavlovsk. We're not surprised. Until earlier this year, when our cruise ship stopped in on a very-necessary refuelling stop across the vast northern Pacific ocean headed for Alaska, we were amongst you.

Petropavlovsk - the Peter-Paul city – or Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky(to discriminate it from another Petropavlovsk in central Asia)  is about as remote a city as you can get. There are only two ways to arrive here, by air or ship. No railway. No highways. It is is the second largest city in the world that is unreachable by road. 

In the city itself, (pop. around 200,000) there are roads, of course, and a few to outlying areas, but nothing that links to Moscow, 6,766km away, or other parts of Russia, for this is where Petropavlovsk is located. Eastern Russia. The Russian far-east, they call it. The Kamchatka peninsula itself is fascinating, remote and wild, washed by the waters of the North Pacific, populated by brown bears and arctic wildlife such as foxes, wolverines, seals and puffins. The terrain is hostile, volcanic, earthquake-prone. It is also the site of Russia's largest submarine base.

The place looked so bleak and uninviting that some people on our ship felt it was a waste of time to go ashore, but we wanted to explore it for ourselves and joined a tour group as, according to the local laws, there was no other way to be allowed to disembark.

Even so, the view from the ship, anchored in Avacha Bay gave us stunning, albeit wintry views of the coast and the mist-topped volcanos.

WATCH THIS VIDEO: to get more of an idea of this fascinating area.

If the weather had been better (or indeed if we had come just a few months later) we could have seen these rocks, Tri Brata, or 'three brothers', marking the entrance to the bay. Local lore suggests that these are the three brothers who went to defend the town from a tsunami and in doing so turned to stone.

Some fellow passengers from our ship joined a tour to a place that trained huskies for sled work and, despite trudging through calf-high snowdrifts, declared it the best thing they had done.

Take a good look at this lovely magical Russian Orthodox Church of the Holy Trinity – because it will be a little while until it looks this good again. Sadly a year or so ago, it was vandalised and burnt out and currently it is being rebuilt and restored.

This is why when we visited the city in late-April 2013, there was scaffolding obscuring the pure and lovely lines of this elegant building.

By way of contrast, Lenin remains in the centre of the town. While much of Russia has relegated this historic character to ignominy, here he proudly oversees a square that is used for public meetings or casual gatherings.

In winter, the paving was cracked by the extremes of the icy season, but in summer it is a busy and convivial spot.

Petropavlovsk has all the amenities of any city - just a little more remote and isolated than in other countries.

Our tour took us to a restaurant, with a name that translated as the Blue Anchor, for lunch and a show, and while it was not perhaps as thrilling as visiting the sled-dogs, at least it was warm and dry inside the cavernous upstairs room, packed with diners. 

It was made even more cheerful by local Kamchatka beer with its label reminding us that we were ringed by volancoes, many of them still active!

And like function food anywhere we ate heartily if not a little blandly. Under that topping on my plate, though, I discovered a delicious piece of fish, which is not surprising as this area is particularly well-known for its fine salmon and huge crabs which thrive in the chilly pristine waters.

Better still, there was authentic ethnic entertainment delivered by hugely energetic young people beating loud drums while dancing  and singing - and apparently enjoying themselves as much as we were.

Yet, if we'd had time (and some from our ship did) we could have visited a thermal centre such as this and splashed away in hot springs or blissed out having a massage afterwards.

In case you're wondering, Petropavlovsk (literally Peter-Paul) was not directly called after the apostles. It was named in 1740 by an early navigator, Danish seaman Vitus Bering (who also left his name on the strait to the far north), whose two ships were called St Peter and St Paul. The settlement was granted town status in 1812.

With even more time – and who knows, on another visit we might do this – we could have explored further on the peninsula (hopefully avoiding the bears!)  and seen creatures such as these seals, puffins and other seabirds.

But on this, our first - and maybe only – visit, with the refuelling finished and the ship's motors beginning to warm up, we watched from the deck as we slipped away from this unique and frosty place.