Sunday, August 31, 2014

Kurilskoye Lake, Kamchatka (22 August): Helitourists

22 August 2014

Kurilskoye Lake, Kamchatka, Russia


Helitourists. We went in the deep end of Kamchatka. today it was about helicopters. Tomorrow will be about bears. Of course there is an interesting blog to be written about decision-making – how can one decide to drop significant cash at the end of the earth after scrimping along for months. But that is a blog for another time.
Nana Patsy and the kids: intergenerational helitourists.
Because that's how we roll!

So today was about helicopters. About MI-8 former Russian military helicopters. About waiting around for other members of our group to arrive at the heliport. About picking daisies while other helicopters hover to the center of the field and then, in a great flurry, approximate a “take-off”. This is apparently the standard Russian helicopter practice. In time the group is gathered and we assemble on the benches inside, earphones secured, with our luggage heaped in the middle. The helicopter banks and heads south. We fly no more than 500 feet above ground, which feels like 100 feet. At times the ground comes up to meet us and we’re closer to 20-30 feet. The kids? Very exciting for 10 minutes. Maybe 15. Then they’re ready for a nap. Napping in a helicopter? Really, what is with kids these days?

Our first stop is crater lake of Schtubelya situated inside Ksudach Volcano. This is a huge caldera about 45 minutes (by helicopter) south of Petropavlovsk. The helicopter lands on an ashy rise above a steely blue lake that has filled in the crater. Liam is excited for about 10 seconds when he gets of the plane in his best matching cotton shorts and shirt from Thailand. But the wind is harsh beyond reason, and it’s all he can do to hug himself for the few seconds it takes us to muster a family photo before he scurries back on board. We’re level with the snow fields in the mountain gorges surrounding us. We’re north!

Schtubelya Crater Lake. Cold if you're dressed for the tropics



The last stop for us was this little electric-fence fortified compound of cabins on the shores of Kurilskoye Lake which is where we’re getting ready for our next adventure.

Landing in Kurilskoye Lake. Our not-quite-bear-proof compound for 3 days.



Tuesday, August 26, 2014

Petropavlovsk, Kamchatka (21 August): Observations

Avacha Bay. Jumping over a volcano and a brother!
21 August

Petropavlovsk, Kamchatka, Russia

Some gleanings from the report of George Kennan, Tent Life in Siberia, originally published in 1870, remain true to this day. A couple choice quotations:


The sights of Petropavlovsk, speaking after the manner of toursits, are few and uninteresting. It has two monuments erected to the meory of the distinguished navigators Bering and La Perouse, and there are traces on irs hills of the fortifications built during the Crimean War to repel the attack of the allied French and English squadrons; but aside from these, the town can boast of no objects or places of historical interest.

The kids will add to this list an abundance of ocean-smoothed glass available to sharp-eyed young tourists.

What the ancestors of the Russians did at the Tower of Babel to have been afflicted with such a complicated, contorted, mixed up, utterly incomprehensible language, I can hardly conjecture. I have thought sometimes that they must have built their side of the Tower higher than any of the other tribes, and have been punished for their sinful industry with this jargon of unintelligible sounds, which no man could possibly hope to understand before he became so old and inform that he could never work on another tower. However they came by it, it is certainly a thorn in the flesh to all travellers in the Russian Empire.
 

Language has not been our strong suit. We’re always grateful to come across one of the minority of Russians who speaks English. In this respect Russia is like China. I have no doubt that there are many English speakers, but they are diluted amidst the general population. In a place like Vietnam or Mongolia, it felt like a lot more people spoke English, particularly in the hospitality industry.

One of these rare English-speaking birds was an attendant at the log-cabin orthodox church downtown. She exuded warmth and gave Gracie candles to make an offering at the wooden Jesus.

In Ulan-Ude and Irkutsk, log cabin architecture was all the rage -- some kind of homage to nineteenth century Russian frontiersman ship. In Petropavlovsk, the only things log cabin were these churches and, as far as we could tell all orthodox churches were built from the same set of lincoln logs. I make light of it, but actually it's really cool. Unpretentious. Practical. Non-concrete.


Tuesday, August 19, 2014

Transiberian Railroad Day 2, near Skovorodino (18 August): Northern Exposure

18 August 2014

Train from Irkutsk to Khabarovsk, Near Skovorodino
 
That little wiggle at the bottom of the map is China.
The white line heading north goes, after some time, to Yakutsk.

Northern Exposure. The train has now reached our northern-most latitude as it slips around Chinese Manchuria defined here by the Amur River. Glued to the window for an hour, I finally saw the split in the rail lines for which I had penned this couplet:

Out on the taiga the tracks diverged
Strong as horses I felt the urge
And stared at the rails
to the tundra mouth
-- The capstone completion!
-- The perfect solution!
Then prudence took hold
and the train turned south

We’re at the point in the journey where the Yakutsk-bound train begins its weary trek above tree-line and into the permafrost. Upon arrival there is, apparently, nothing much to see. Boasting rights isn’t quite enough to justify the lengthy detour – two days there and another two returning to this spot.


Borsch. Strictly popular with the Roseville crowd. No kidding.


This is now our third night in car 10. All batteries have run out, except for those in the children – not mine – dashing up and down the corridor well after bedtime. No ithings. No back-up batteries. No kindle. My computer has been recharged twice, but it required availing myself of the attendant two cars down. I may try my luck again tomorrow. The staff have been wonderfully helpful, but the five of us are spread across 4 koupés still. We have no flexibility to move anyone because, since we’re all in top bunks, we have no seat currency. The children have all turned their bunks into forts, recruiting sheets to close-off little subapartments. They’re bunking with total strangers now – everyone in our compartments have turned over besides the captain’s family in Patsy’s and Constantine, the puzzle master, in my own.

Liam’s Blog: This train is awesome it is fancy fake wood style with a big window but there is no sockets so everyone ran out of battery on the first day so I have been playing cards like the whole time.

The Big Picture. I’m becoming nostalgic because this will also be our last train ride on the Tip to Tundra Tour. Trains have moves us from the Malay peninsula back in May up to Bangkok, and then from Saigon to Hanoi. We caught trains again in SW China, first into Dali and then to central China – Chongqing. From Chongqing we made our way to Xi’an again on the train. We got a taste of Chinese bullet trains (300 kph) from Xi’an to Beijing, and then tested the Transmongolian up to Ulanbaatar (wrong wheels). Now we’ve been back-and-forth around the south end of Lake Baikal, with our momentum carrying us all the way to the edge of the pacific.


You can measure that in miles, or more appropriately kilometers. In hours, of course. In nights slept. In sleep interruptions. How about counting in noodle packs, in conversations, in hands of rummy, in things left behind? How about in counting in sunsets, station stops or misunderstandings? How about disposables disposed of, water bottles filled, familial arguments, or cows? (Will you accept waterbuffalo? How about yaks?) This summer has been unlike any before or any likely to come afterward. The children are at a tipping point – the stresses of being a teenager away from her social life already daunt Carrie, while Grace barely possesses the maturity for 2 ½ months of travel. Soon they return to their suburban American home veterans of trains in Vietnam, China, Mongolia and Russia, and veterans of buses, taxi’s, tuk-tuks, bicycles and myriad other conveyances in all countries we’ve touched. I ache with curiosity to know how these experiences bake into their character.


Day 3 update: Gracie will go on to say that this is her favorite of all the trains we've taken. "It's so fancy," she says,' echoing Liam's sentiment about the faux wood veneer in the cabins. 

Transiberian Railroad Day 1, near Chika (17 August): The Perfect Moment

17 August 2014


Train from Irkutsk to Khabarovsk, Near Chita

Transiberian Warm-up. At 60 hours, this is our longest train trip. Our tickets were purchased late and with some confusion so we are all, except for Liam and Grace, in separate koupés within the same car. This has the distinct advantage of meeting more people in the car and spending more time moving around. For example, 36 hours into the journey we have had almost no infighting. If only I’d learned this secret in China!

This is the Transiberian Railroad – capital letters and all, but this is not the Transiberian Train. The 044 from Moscow doesn’t make it all the way to Vladivostok, but ends at our destination, Khabarovsk. As such, little amenities I imagine might be on the Transsiberian are denied to us, at least in second class koupés – showers, A/C, in my koupé’s case at least a window that opens. Constantine, who has been on since Moscow, has become quite ripe and the whole compartment was done no favors yesterday when a small milk carton exploded all over. So it’s a bit of an olfactory factory in here in the third koupé of car 10, but I take solace in the nose’s ability to adapt and ignore.

My perfect Transsiberian moment arrived last night at 7:25. All was well after a dinner of cheese and peanut butter, crackers and bread. Constantine sought me out and announced a double rainbow. It arched over the tracks in front of the train as we stood in the corridor and stared. Then car 10 slid past a little frontier town and the blue onion domes of a little Orthodox church rose above the corrugated roofs. The rainbow stayed with us for many more minutes and the wind blew in my face. Constantine and I decided that was pretty great.

Americans in the dining car! or, card sharks and their tea

Official Russian Train tea cups





Irkutsk, Siberia (16 August): Adventures and Mis-

16 August 2014

Minibus from Olkhon Island to Irkutsk

The Country Outside the Window. Outside the colors change from the light green of pine forest to the dun brown of steppe. Oh, here is a field of light purple wheat grass for variety. I’m sitting across from Gracie and Patsy, Anita’s mother, also known here abouts as Nana Patsy. We’re returning from a couple days on Olkhon Island, a chip of land into the sapphire waters of Lake Baikal. Tonight we’ll begin a three-day journey on the Transiberian, stepping down in Khabarovsk, two time zones west of here. On the inked route of our journey, this is where the northern trajectory turns due west.

Russia Far-East Log Cabin-Style
From Mongolia we drove north to Ulan-Ude , passing through Russian customs, complete with drug-sniffing dog and getting back onto pavement to the great relief of all passengers. The next day, 12 August, was hands down the most stressful of the trip so far. Arriving in a new country is never easy. There is new money to get used to, new ways of doing business, new taxi rates, train websites, etc. In this case, we had to get to Irkutsk on this day or we would miss Patsy’s arrival by flight from Moscow. Little did I know the 11 am from Ulan-Ude was departing at 11 am Moscow Time +5 hours – which meant dragging Gracie to the train station just time to find no one on the tracks which was all quite mysterious until eventually someone figured out I had no idea about this Moscow-time convention. Surprise! We have an afternoon in Ulan-Ude, which would have been fine, except our 7 pm arrival suddenly changed to a midnight arrival. Add to this that our hotel was actually a private apartment in some anonymous apartment block surrounded by construction. But the icing on the cake was that Carrie was increasingly nauseous. Peeling out of our compartment, she went first to one end of the train and then to the other only to find both bathrooms locked. She was able to enlist a convenient trash receptacle in which to be sick, a trash receptacle that wasn’t there when she got off the train in Irkutsk at midnight to be sick again on the platform. The two other kids were too grumpy about having been awoken with too little sleep to offer much sympathy. Then the cab driver spotted us as marks. After finally finding the door to our apartment, he held our luggage hostage until I overpaid him about 8x the appropriate cab fare (about $66 for a $9 ride).
Cotton candy in front of Lenin's head.
Ulan-Ude

By 1 am, Liam was at the end of his rope, “Just pay the man, Dad. This is ridiculous.” He was right; I had lost. That was little solace.


The dark events of the evening were overshadowed by the joy of a 6 am knock on the door from Patsy, smiling and ready for come-what-may. I had been worried after our experience that she wouldn’t be able to find the place. I had been armed with a note that a helpful hotelier had written for me in Ulan-Ude and we still had troubles. She was fresh off the boat. I was up until 2 am trying to resolve the issue cross referencing plane schedules and sun rises and so forth. But all that worry had been for naught. After connecting with Anita and the kids in Bangkok, with Karen Schweickart and Lauryn in Siem Reap, with Elizabeth McDonald and Skye in Beijing, here stood the final link. Patsy will be finishing the journey with us.

Othodox church, Irkutsk. We were luck enough to catch a mass
here before leaving and got incensed!
Irkutsk Oblast. Irkutsk is a provincial outpost of imperial Russia. It is filled with buildings that have a distinctly eastern frontier architecture – log cabins with planked wainscoting and elaborate gingerbread window trim. The style is absolutely unique, completely unlike the Mongolian gers that were here before. It bears more resemblance to the American west, or Northern Minnesota log cabins, than to anything really Asian at all. And then of course there are these elaborate, 100% Russian, decorations. In the Soviet era, it gained an statue of Lenin pointing not optimistically east toward the new frontier and the rising sun, but westward toward Moscow and authority. The statue retains enough cache to be the focus of a lovely flower garden. The city grew as well, including set-piece soviet buildings like the marble railway station as well as a few cinderblock monstrosities.

 

In terms of progress toward the tundra, Irkutsk is 52° N, which is north of the U.S.-Canadian border. It is north of Calgary and just about every other large Canadian city except Edmonton.

We were in Irkutsk to see Lake Baikal before experiencing the epic train ride that is Transiberian. Lake Baikal has the distinction of being the largest freshwater lake in the world by volume. It contains roughly 20% of the world’s unfrozen surface fresh water. It’s a “rift lake” so its deep – 1642 m at its deepest. Picture Lake Superior at the latitude of the Hudson Bay, with crystal clear cold waters, a railroad that goes the whole way around, and its own species of seals. (According to Wikipedia, it may also be the world’s oldest lake. I don’t know who figured that out, but perhaps that’s what it takes to get your own species of seal.) The water is so fresh the water system for our town drew directly from the lake. That’s what we did as well.


Olkhon Island is connected to the mainland only by pair of serviceable ferries that alternate every half-hour. Cars line up for hours, but public buses, even if loaded with foreign tourists, get pride of place. The pavement had ended some miles before the ferry terminal, so no one was surprised that Olkhon Island itself was completely unpaved. In fact, there may not even be a road grater. Vans like ours chose a track – a la Mongolia – and just chase it across the hills and dales that make the island. The only choke point I saw was a tree draped with prayer flags where all pass traffic stopped to pay homage with small coins or pieces of cloth. It turns out you need more than water to change steppes into something else. Olkhon is a sandy steppe desert surrounded by water.




Dusty Doings. Khuzhir is the largest settlement on the island, and is where Olga’s Homestay is to be found. Olga is the image of an efficient, middle-aged Russian woman running what is anything but a homestay – much more akin to a boarding house, with several plank-houses built with cantilevered porches. Our rooms were little cubbies into which two beds had been crammed there being no space for anything else. Like the rest of Olkhon, Khuzhir has not been discovered by concrete, so the houses are largely wood and the roads and alleys are wide and sandy. All yards are enclosed, so walking along is mostly looking at 2m high fences. Even the dust is covered in dust. 

Patsy relaxes in something between paradise and the
post-apocalpytic wasteland of Khuzhir's rusty port.
Khuzhir has four attractions. The first is a first-class beach that stretches for kilometers along the Maloe Sea of Lake Baikal. This was enough for the kids right there. Everything else paled in comparison. The second attraction is a lovely crag or chalk that defines the tip of the town. The third is a relatively new Orthodox church with onion domes from central casting and a free-standing belfry out front. The church is poised above the village, so you can see it from anywhere. Fourth, at least this week, was a spirit tree clinging to the edge of a cliff. Someone, perhaps a local Buryat, had hung a totem from a lower branch consisting of three twigs in a triangle with fishing string webbed across the middle. I don’t know how may spirits it caught, but it certainly held my attention as I admired it from the edge of the cliff.
 
Our current configuration. We're delighted to have Patsy, Anita's mom, along for the ride!
Walking along the beach Liam said this was his favorite part of Russia because if he dropped a stone in the water he could see it falling all the way to the bottom.

Glimpse of the rare Baikal seal photobombing
Carrie and I reasoned that if we could but get mountain bikes we could get a different perspective on the island, perhaps from the central ridge, or even hike down to the opposite shore. Instead the vendor sent us further along the road. Carrie was really upset by the 2nd hour of this, and even worse by the 3rd hour, when all we had encountered were a few additional beaches and kilometer after kilometer of sandy roads, many of them requiring us to walk the bikes. It’s more fun when bonding experiencing end with an amazing vista or a cool ride. This particular bonding experience was far more work than either of us envisioned. Perhaps we should have tried the central ridge anyway? To make up for lost time she recruited Grace and Patsy to go back to the beach with her at 7:30 am this morning before breakfast and the bus to make a big sand castle.



All in all, it was a chance to catch our breath before the last legs of the Tip to Tundra Tour. Let’s hope we caught enough breath to make this train ride!