Siberia now

it's true

2006-10-24T01:03:00.000+09:00

pics are overdue. Coming soon...

delta

2006-10-24T00:59:00.000+09:00

Our last full day aboard the Mikhail Svetlov would have kicked off with morning exercises on the sun deck if we'd been up in time. Instead at 10.30 we joined the Turks in the music salon for an English language showing of Indiana Jones and Temple of Doom. When you are sailing into the Arctic there is nothing that sets the mood, I find, like Harrison Ford apparently coated in sunflower oil.
The Turkish watched Indiana Jones exactly like K and I currently watch Russian films, which is to say we laugh at all of the slapstick jokes and none of the others. Several of the Turks including, pleasingly, Captain Candiru, were also of the kind that like to offer advice at dramatic intervals when watching a film. "Watch out for the arrows!" one woman said. "Ah, geez, he's going to get crushed," said Captain Candiru.
Around midday came the news that a two-day storm was raging around Tiksi. We gathered in the ship's cinema (did I mention, cruise ship?) for an explanation by the ship's captain, Georgy, of what this meant and how bad, if the weather kept up, things could get. He ended his talk by explaining that the wind currently whipping up whitecaps on a fairly open stretch of the Lena was blowing 18 miles per second, while the ship could withstand 30 to 35 miles per second. Some of his reassuring tone was, I think, lost in translation, and by the time a waitress named Olga demonstrated how to wear the life jackets there were hands in the air all over the shop. What experience did the crew have of storms in this part of the world? Was there a chance of icebergs? A German woman, at whose weight I will leave you to guess, wanted to know if the life jackets could support a very, very large person. Olga claimed each life jacket could take up to 600kg, which suggests to me a bit of quick-thinking falsification on Olga's part, but it seemed to do the trick.
Not long after Kyusur the last spurs of the Verkhoyansk mountains had risen on the right. Basically bare stone with silly toy pines clinging to grass between rock and scree, it's the Verkhoyansk range that turns the Lena almost due north for its long final stretch. Eastwards the mountains cover an area the size of France but with far fewer louvres and Fabien Barthezes.The river narrowed here, and deepened. The wind threw up spits of icy water in an air temperature that had dropped to zero. The shoreline was lined with washed up trunks of bleached pine. Once or twice a motor boat was pulled up beneath the cliffs, but we saw not a single living soul all day.
Over dinner we heard Orhan's tales of travels in Central Asia. One of his stories involved leaving Uzbekistan for Afghanistan at a border point which, it turned out, was unofficial and manned by rebels under the control of a local warlord. Orhan had been refused entry, in response to which he had argued, shouted and snapped a photograph of the heavily-armed man interviewing him. Arrested and sent back to Uzbekistan, Orhan had dealt with the situation by asking as many questions as he could of his guard "to confuse the man", and then running away from him. I made a mental note not to apply any of Orhan's travel advice in real life.
By evening the wind and died and we were in the Arctic. On the right side (yes, yes, starboard) were the last gorgeous grey points with their scree and dribbles of green. On the other side the shore looked like a links golf course. The only colours were white and grey and a deep otherworldly green. Here and there was a lick of white that turned out, when we drifted close enough, to be a glacier, or the cold side of a rise in whose shadow the snow never melted. There was no longer a tree to be seen.
Just before midnight the sky lit up with streaks of red and purple. At this time of year it never gets dark enough here to need a reading light. In winter the sun comes up around February 15. Set your watches. At 1am we passed Stolb (pillar) Island, a single large rock that, if it didn't mark the beginning of the Lena Delta, would never have so many people hauling themselves out of bed to stand in the cold and photograph it. A fishing trawler had anchored in its lee. Black-tipped gulls shrieked overhead. In the tundra on the left there was a tiny settlement, six or seven sheds and boxes of what might have been a research station. Immediately afterwards the shore dropped away on both sides. The wind had dropped to a breeze. We were in the Lena delta, and some time in the night we sailed in and out of the Laptev Sea.

Kyusur

2006-10-20T10:36:00.000+09:00

Kyusur is on the right bank of the Lena, a day's boat journey beyond Zhigansk - further north than all of mainland Europe. The shore is a scree slope with nothing to anchor your triple-decked cruise ship except huge pieces of driftwood, and from the bank above you can look both ways down the river, across to beautiful red cliffs and think 'bite me, Finland'.
The few hundred wooden cottages that make up the village itself are raised on stilts on land normally frozen, and when not frozen, swampy. If I was a real estate agent I think I would call Kyusur land 'moisturised'. Wooden boardwalks have been laid from house to house, although most are now rotting or loose (real estate agent: 'traditional'). There's a strange Land of the Giants effect, which I realised after a while had to do with the forest growing up to the back steps of the last houses in the village. This far north so much of the land is frozen year-round that the forest is dwarf taiga, stunted pines and firs of 1.5 to 2m, which is no taller than, say, Condoleezza Rice. Near the path above the river bank someone had put up a teepee.
When the Svetlov laid anchor some fishermen drove down the pebble slope in a ute. This was the only proper vehicle we saw in Kyusur, except for a sort of bulldozer/tractor hybrid that I didn't understand but badly wanted to drive. The roads into the taiga don't lead far and the nearest village of any size up or down river is Tiksi, 500km away. The only other form of motorised transport in the village were heavy black motorbikes with sidecars. I kept wishing Steve McQueen would ride up and tell me which way to run from the Jerries. The ute was loaded with half a dozen canvas sacks. Inside each sack, as it turned out when the ship's chef went to investigate, there were three or four river fish, each the size of a thin, flippered child. Money changed hands, and bags of flour, then, as a latecomer fisherman bolted down the river bank with a mounted set of reindeer antlers, Galina threw from the deck six litre-bottles of vodka. Most people in Kyusur are Evenki, but that doesn't stop them wearing as much army camouflage as the Russians or, evidently, drinking like them. My favourite was a man who had opted for a thin handlebar moustache with crew cut and Fidel Castro military cap, and looked like a Bond villain in waders.
Keeping as much of the village as possible between us and Captain Candiru ("What is this place? Why are we here? Where's a man supposed to get coffee?") we came across a strange memorial, spray painted gaudy silver and showing three poles, one of them bent and broken. Later I learned what had happened, and it doesn't make a pleasant story.
When Hitler turned on the USSR during WWII the Soviet leader, Stalin, became convinced that various non-Russian populations were certain to defect to the Germans. He decided the easiest solution would be to ship these people en masse to Siberia. Ordinary folk mainly from the Baltics were put onto trains, then in Siberia forced onto iron barges and sent off down the Yenisey or the Lena. One group arrived in Zhigansk, another in Tiksi, and in 1941 a group of 2000 was sent to Kyusur. The journey was bad enough. The barges were open, with little in the way of food, shelter or medicine. People became sick and dozens died of illness or exposure. It was already autumn when the survivors reached Kyusur. Nothing had been nothing prepared for them. The village was even smaller than it is today - a few dozen wooden cottages hugging the riverbank. There was no shelter, no food stores and the locals had no way to clothe more than a handful of extra people for the northern winter. Most of the exiles arrived with only the clothes on their backs - thin jackets and caps for the east European autumn. The locals, reportedly, did what they could, hunting, fishing, making tents and digging shelters in the earth. But it wasn't enough. By the war's end all but a handful of the exiles had died. Most didn't even survive the first winter.

lower Lena: Arctic Circle

2006-10-09T22:00:00.000+09:00

Unless I am overlooking one of our family holidays in Llandudno, before leaving Zhigansk I had never before been on a cruise ship. They built the Mikhail Svetlov in Austria, raising the interesting question of how it was brought to Yakutsk, 2000km inland from anywhere. The captain, Georgy, didn't know but he thought they may actually have sailed it around in summer, across the top of Scandinavia by sea. It used to have a hammer and sickle stamped on its two funnels but now has the symbol of Alrosa, the Yakutsk diamond company. Except for plane, it was the only way this summer of getting as far as Tiksi, the Lena port on the Arctic Ocean.
The passengers on the Mikhail Svetlov were mostly retirees and mostly of the opinion that whenever you leave your country, you need ideally to look as much like a carnival float as your budget will allow. Not all, but I would say the majority of passengers looked as though they'd broken into a puppet theatre and said, 'Look, there's a possibility that on this trip I'm doing, I'm going to have to look inconspicuous in a group of clowns and war reporters. Do you think you could fit me out?" There were 65 Germans, three or four families of Moscow Russians and a dozen Turks, and if I were to start listing the gratuitous zips, the pockets and patches, the ponchos and brightly coloured raincoats, the Peruvian pom pom hats, the mu-mus and the side-shield sunglasses which, frankly, make you look like a retired German sniper, we would be here all night. K and I survived as best we could, subsisting three times a day on a buffet of fish, schnitzel, salad and cheesecake, supplemented only by salmon, olives and plates of cold cuts, and all of this only occasionally including horse meat. We befriended the Turks, including the actress, all shawls, eyeliner and billowing, currently playing the mum in the Turkish TV remake of 'Bewitched'. Apparently her wealth and fame allows her to spend most of the year travelling, because when this cruise had finished she was off to Patagonia and then with the Turkish Travellers' Club to North Korea and the South Pole.
"My dear, you have to see everything," she said, when I asked.
We sat in the restaurant with Orhan Kural, author, mining engineer, president of the Turkish Traveller's Club and, as it turned out, Turkish Consul to Benin and Ghana. Orhan would regale us with his travels, his strong views against bloodsport and his outrage that the cruise organisers would make announcements only in German and worse, continually forget he was vegetarian. We would refill from the salmon plate and gently foster rebellion. Thus did the meal times pass.
In the afternoons there were films and lectures. K and I had 48 hours on board so there was no sense in not improving ourselves. The lectures tended to focus on the local peoples of the lands we were passing through. This afternoon's was on the Yukagir, perhaps the oldest surviving inhabitors of Yakutia, having been slaughtered and pushed north with their reindeer in turn by the Evenki, Yakuts and the Russians. Yukagir today are the least numerous of the northern peoples in Yakutia. Traditionally, they lived by hunting wild reindeer. At the word 'hunt' I saw Orhan look up. Masha, the shy Yakut girl reading the lecture, explained that the Yukagir made most of their kills during the reindeers' annual migration. As the reindeer swept north, stick-waving Yukagir would drive them into a narrow valley, where in a killing frenzy 10 hunters could slaughter as many as 1000 reindeer in an hour.
"Why did they need to kill so many?" Orhan said.
"They lived off the reindeer," said Masha.
"It's a lot to eat," said Orhan, fairly, I feel.
"You're sure they didn't trade any, just kill them for the skin or the horns?"
"I'm pretty sure the meat would have been stored and fed a lot of people for a long time."
"I think they traded them. There's no need to kill so many reindeer. It's a crazy number," said Orhan. He was beginning to get worked up. I wondered what action he planned to take against the ancient Yukagir. Buy Evenki? Sadly he was interrupted by a Turkish-Jewish-American man whose mean, foul temperament I would bottle, if I were a scientifically inclined maniac, to unleash on the cheerful. For the time being I will call him Captain Candiru.
"Is there a history of soap?" said Captain Candiru.
"Is there a history of what?" said Masha.
"Soap. Did the Yukagir use soap. I mean, what did they clean themselves with?"
Masha conferred for a while with her translator. The Yukagir may not have had soap, she said, but they washed regularly, in winter scrubbing themselves in the snow. Nobody was impressed with this, especially Captain Candiru.
"Dirty," he said. "Yukagir. Shmutsik."

summer days, drifting away

2006-10-04T19:22:00.001+09:00

In the local weekly newspaper (birthdays on the back) there was a vox pop: How do you see Zhigansk in 20 years time? I think the answers give you some idea of what Zhigansk is like today. "I think in the future there will be buses and beautiful buildings," said Zoya, a languages student at Yakutsk State University. There'll be "asphalt in our region and new stone houses", according to Pensioner Svetlana Romanova, who in fairness has probably already seen peace in our time and slaves and slave owners sitting together at the table of brotherhood.
We were in Zhigansk in the last days of its two-week summer, camping near a kiddies' holiday camp by a lake in the taiga. Everyone kept telling us the weather was going to break and when it did, which would be soon, the winter would hit quickly. October in Zhigansk is -10C and January, on average, -40C. Ludmilla Igorevna in the museum remembered a day when she was a girl when it hit -57C. Breath freezes only at -70C, but at -57C you can spit and watch it ping off the footpath, if that's how you like to start your mornings. -57 degrees is cold enough to make it difficult to breathe. To be out you have to cover everything but your eyes. Even in a regular winter you can get sick pretty quickly in Zhigansk from the freezing fog that pours in off the Lena. People get around in clothes made from reindeer hide, which although waterproof and one of the warmest natural materials, gets itchy close to the skin and is impossible to get clean. Visiting the outdoor toilet is a problem, so much so that despite not having plumbing many people rig up something indoors or poo in a bucket.
In our camp by the lake it was reindeer meat for luch and dinner. What famous singers do we have in Australia, the kiddies wanted to know. If you're interested in adapting this conversation for your own dinner parties, it is called 'List the things you do and don't have in your country.' No, we don't have reindeer. Yes, we have cows, but they brought those in, from England probably. No, we don't have bears. No, we don't really have hurricanes, except sometimes where it's tropical and then we do have hurricanes. Yes, we've had the Olympics. In Sydney, yes, but also in our town. No, they were summer games. No, there wasn't ice hockey. Mm, I don't know, because I don't really know what fox berries are. Yes, we have computers. No, I don't know what drivers they have. Yes, probably pentium. I promise you, this can go on for hours.
The lake couldn't have been more than 10km from Zhigansk but it took us an hour to get here, standing on the back of an open truck and crashing along not so much a road as a strip in the taiga where there weren't trees. In Soviet times, local dignitaries came out here for schmoozing and retreats. Assuming your Clintons and Bushes also get by with pit toilets and occasional bear attacks, I think it's fair to call it the Martha's Vineyard of the Siberian Arctic. The day was wet and overcast, because only having a two-week summer is no guarantee it's going to be nice, and everywhere around, clinging to berry bushes and lurking in the moss, were things waiting to bite us. Aisha Igorevna and Ivan Nikolayevich, who we were staying with in Zhigansk, had warned us about this, furnishing us before we left with two beekeeper hats with camouflage green netting to cover face and neck. We put these on when Misha offered to take us into the forest to pick wild raspberries. Misha was seventeen, Yakut and way out on his own in the kiddies' camp in respect of being willing to speak Russian (rather than Yakut) without giggling.
K stepped first into the forest and was besieged by an evil grey cloud. I don't know how long it had been since the mosquitoes near Zhigansk had a crack at something warm blooded, but I suspect in mosquito time it had been something about which their fathers' fathers had only heard tell. You could see them homing in, their tiny brains giddy with the thought that their season of dedicated breeding hadn't been in vain. In all the whining I swear I could hear the words 'drain the Europeans'. Immediately we regretted our choice of almost all of our clothing. Did we think we were gardening that we had worn only cotton gloves? Why long-sleeved T-shirts when we had in our pack perfectly reasonable though unsummery thick coats? We'd tucked our trousers into socks, long sleeves into gloves but this was as Lear to the ocean. The mosquitoes laughed tiny mocking laughs. I rubbed my arm and my sleeve smeared black. The mosquitoes made for my neck. At this point let me tell you something about beekeeper hats. They might be all right for bees. They're probably fine for mosquitoes, perhaps when there's a few, or a few dozen. But when you go raspberry picking in the taiga in summer you want to make sure of two things. One, make sure the neck of your beekeeper hat somehow seals, so nothing can fly or squirm under it. Two, make sure the man who lent you your beekeeper hat isn't a chainsmoker, in particular that he isn't so much of a chainsmoker that he has cut a hole in the netting to fit a cigarette through. Not checking both of these things can be very, very bad. Plus, don't believe what you hear about camouflage. You can fully still be seen. We learned afterwards that cows die in the taiga round here in summer, not because they are bitten to death but because midges and mosquitoes swarm into their nostrils and suffocate them. Kids are injured now and again because calves get agitated and gallop blindly out of the woods.
Midges climbed into my ears and my nose. Somehow, while K and I were being devoured, Misha had begun to tell a story. He was unflustered by the mosquitoes, perhaps because his skin was made of titanium. I lost track of some of the details because I was thrashing at my hands and neck and face, seriously wondering whether setting a forest fire could have a downside. The story, so far as I can recall, had to do with some evacuees who were shipped here out of the way of the Germans during World War Two. One woman lived out here by the lake and during that time lost her daughter in the forest. Nobody knows what became of the daughter but some suspect she was murdered by a local man. Misha made me promise not to tell anyone. I do not know if I replied, because I by then I had lost the capacity to think. My eyes, lips, and forehead were swollen. My fingers were prickling and burning. When Misha, his own face coming out in angry red lumps, suggested that maybe we would be better coming back for the raspberries another time, I put my head down and galloped for the
clearing. I would not have cared if I had hit a child.
Dinner was reindeer meat and conversation. The evening began with us telling of Nicole Kidman, Russell Crowe, Kylie Minogue and Kostya Tszyu and so completing the list of famous people we have in our country. It segued, as these intellectual evenings do, into questions about other famous people, including Jean Claude Van Damme, Mike Tyson and Shakira, on the off chance we might have forgotten about them sharing our passport. It ended, I feel in disappointment, not long after we had been asked, 'Do you have Jennifer Lopez in your country?'

Zhigansk

2006-09-28T21:48:00.000+09:00

Zhigansk, Arctic Circle

2006-09-28T21:12:00.000+09:00

Here are some of the highlights of Turkmenistani TV, which is all they get by satellite in Zhigansk, the Arctic moppets, along with the usual Russian channels (The Nanny: remade, Who's the Boss: remade, Who Wants to be a Millionaire, What Not to Wear, Dancing with the Stars, Dancing with the Stars on Ice, remade) and the news from Krasnodar.

TV4
All the latest happenings on the Turkmen State Commodity and Raw Materials Exchange. Did you know you can order knitwork from Turkmenistan according to specification, unit, quantity and price? Me neither! There's cotton overalls, women's capri pants, men's high boots (how high, is my question). You can get hold of yarn waste, if it floats your boat, so long as you're willing to pay in advance and in Turkmeni lira. I knew nothing of this and now suspect I have been paying over the odds for my yarn waste from Tajikistan. But in the Arctic Circle they've been onto it for ages.

News 1 & 2
Two apparently indistingushable channels. English words roll across the screen on the half hour, pretty words like 'independent' and 'news'. It's all a bit Powerpoint presentation in the titles stage but they get points from me for background, which is a fetching royal blue. There is no anchor so we are straight into the news stories. Here is Turkmenbashi speaking. Here is Turkmenbashi reading. Here is Turkmenbashi enjoying a concert on a stage hung with a giant portrait of Turkmenbashi. The 'other footage' part is when things get a little experimental. Instead of talking heads or, shall we say, footage, there are cuts of shiny buildings, empty city streets, resplendent Ashgabat flower beds, and well-kept Ashgabat highways, artfully filmed from behind resplendent Ashgabat flower beds. To judge from this footage there are no people and hundreds of fountains in Ashgabat. I would be surprised if you could move in Ashgabat for fountains. The only piece in the half hour not centering on Turkmenbashi is about an oil company holding its board meeting in an Ashgabat hotel. This is supplemented with commentary by Turkmenbashi. We close with Turkmenbashi finishing a speech and receiving applause.

Culture channel
I am lucky enough to catch a short silent film. It is no The Wedding Planner in terms of its simple message of humanity, but I think if you stay with me you will get the gist. A small girl dreams of performing in a Turkmen concert. Many other girls perform in these concerts, which are all crowds, balloons, national costumes and, you'll never guess, Turkmenbashi. But she is not among them. This makes her sad. She sits, sad, on an Ashgabat kerb. Suddenly she notices mounted on the wall above her an enormous portrait of Turkmenbashi, holding a pen and smiling. This makes her happy. At home she practices dancing in front of the mirror. She is determined. She drags her mother to a flashy department store and begs for something in puffy tulle. She skips in her tulle through various flashy sections of the flashy department store. Evidently you can pick up dustbusters for a song in Turkmenistan. Soon there is a concert. Girls are performing. There is puff and - yes - tulle. Wait, there is a close up. It is the girl! She is performing in a Turkmen concert. She is very happy. The sky behind her is blue. In the closing wide concert shots featuring Turkmenbashi the sky is grey, but then even in Matthew McConaughey's films I hear there are flaws.

draka (n. fight)

2006-09-27T11:59:00.000+09:00

The race issue has been simmering away in Yakutsk ever since, in the late 1980s, Sakha students ran about the main square overturning cars and setting things on fire, apparently in protest at being pushed out of jobs and to the back of queues by ethnic Russians. In the years after perestroika there was talk of sovereignty for the region, which in constrast to most other autonomous ethnic regions in Russia has a majority non-Russian population and a truckload of diamonds. This idea seems to have been buried, possibly because Yakutia is the size of India but has fewer people than Adelaide and its football team would have been rubbish. Usually when the topic came up we would hear the line from Sakha people, 'Russia can't live without Yakutia, Yakutia can't live without Russia. It's a big brother-little brother relationship'. This reminded me of the other lines we heard quite often, which were 'Russians need a strong leader', which means say what you will about Stalin, he won the war, and 'God likes things in threes', which means there'll be two more bottles of vodka on the way.
Then in a bar called Da Vinci, presumably named because of the artist's close personal ties with Yakutia, we met Andrei. He liked Gorrilaz, Black Eyed Peas and $6 bottles of Asahi. Did he remember the riots? He did, although he was kind of surprised we had heard of them. He was 11 and when his Mum heard about the bottles being thrown and the rubbish bins on fire she locked him in his bedroom. Did he know how the riots started?
"It was over a girl. A Russian guy at the university tried to pinch a Sakha guy's girlfriend. A few students got angry and went out onto the streets. Then it was on."
I said might there have been more to it than that?
"There's quite a bit of history, you understand. In the 50s and 60s most of the good jobs were held by Russian people. My mum remembers walking into shops and having Russian shop assistants sneer at her. They'd refuse to serve her until the last Russian customer had been served and then take their time, pretend they had other things to do before pretending to notice her. You would get picked on if you spoke poor Russian, left out of things at school. Then when the Soviet Union collapsed a lot of the Russians here left for the continent, as we call it, western Russia. Suddenly it seemed like there were a lot more Sakha people around."
"Are there tensions today between Yakut people and Russian people?"
"It depends what you call tensions."
"Let's say, if one group of people get drunk here in Yakutsk, will they beat up another person in the street just because he is Russian, or Sakha, or whatever?"
"Oh that. Of course. It's happened to all of us. You can get beaten up for a lot of things here. Being gay, being dressed differently, being alone. But yeah, being Sakha is one of those things."
A few minutes into our second $6 Asahi a hormonal roar went up on Lenin St outside.
"Draka!" said Andrei's friend Masha, running for the doorway.
"That's our city," said Andrei.

up you automobilists

2006-09-26T18:28:00.000+09:00

I used to think my favourite comedy football team was the Chilean club O'Higgins. Then I discovered the Yakutsk mini-football league. If you hurry before the winter sets in you might still be able to catch:

Cementnik v Automobilist
Almaz (Diamond) v the Municipal Employees

If I ever form a Soviet tribute band my backing group shall be the Municipal Employees. I like to think Cementnik's mascot is a wheelbarrow.

Yakutsk

2006-09-20T14:30:00.000+09:00

pokrovsk: middle Lena

2006-09-20T14:17:00.000+09:00

amga

2006-09-20T14:07:00.000+09:00

is not telling the same as not lying?

2006-09-14T18:06:00.000+09:00

If you go to Yakutsk, pay special attention when you visit the Northern Lights Tour Agency. You should look out for what they do not tell you and you should ask the right questions. They will promise you a quiet weekend on a river bank. They will speak of a small ceremony 'without traditional clothes'. They will look into your eyes and swear there shall be the chance to gather wild strawberries. The most important question you should ask is: 'Will you try to indoctrinate us into
your sun-worshipping cult?'
Six hours into the bus ride to Amga we were already getting slightly sick of the woman sitting next to us. Varvara was a Yakut biologist trained in Tomsk (Womble!) but now retired. She was of the school that thinks that when you speak of your plans, what you really want is for someone to tell you why they are rubbish and force new plans upon you.
"There's no reason to go to Tiksi," said Varvara. "Nothing there at all. In any case it's so far away. You're much better off going to Verkhoyansk."
Verkhoyansk is in far north-eastern Siberia, near nothing at all except the big bare mountains of the same name. It gets cold in winter, apparently colder than all other inhabited spots on earth, but this isn't why Varvara would have liked us to go there. In Verkhoyansk, she said, the rocks look like things. Luckily we didn't have to imagine this bevause she had brought about 150 photos, most of them washed out or sun-splashed.
"This one is a man and a woman embracing. This one is a pregnant girl. This is a warrior seated beside his horse."
We would need less than a week to take in all of Verkhoyansk's sites, Varvara said, beaming through her glasses, and then we could fly direct to Yakutsk. Then we would have a lot more time to relax in the city, which we'd need, because scrambling up and down the rocks in Verkhoyansk can be tiring.
"Wait a second and I'll dig out my bag. There's an album of the very first time I went to Verkhoyansk," she said.
Before this could happen our bus arrived at the river bank. The road to Amga runs south-east from Yakutsk, so the drive there involves crossing the Lena, which at this point was several kilometres wide. You cross on iron barges, everybody queuing in their cars, buses and waziks (a kind of Russian combi van, but used less by people with surfboards and more by people with guns) or more properly, pretending to queue. There were three or four lines, according to where previous barges had loaded. The barge captains cared nothing for history. They arrived at half hour intervals, docking at more or less random points along the sandbank. When this happened, all lines would break and there was a mad mechanical scramble, sedans and four-wheel-drives and waziks crashing over the black earth. Sedans got bogged, buses jammed, and enterprising families piled dirt so they could drive up the side rather than the face of the ramp. We had a good view of several spectacular bingles as we waited more than two hours.
It was another eight hours before Amga. We camped in a row on the riverbank to the song of the morning mosquitos, which here were greenish and huge, like evil Tinkerbells. For lunch the Northern Lights people set up a picnic on the pebbles.
We ate watermelon and tough kebabs and listened to sandflies thwacking into the shade tent.
Alexei Ivanovich began to speak. Until a few years ago he had been a computer programmer. Now he had retired to become a full-time white shaman, a kind of messenger boy between people and good spirits. Somewhere along the way he acquired a miner's jacket from the diamond company Alrosa.
"People think languages are all so different, but they're wrong," he said. "Take English. What is the English word for palatka?"
"Tent," I said, once I had realised that nobody else spoke English.
"In Yakut we have 'tenet', which means 'big house'." A murmur of approval went round the plastic picnic rug, decorated with strawberries.
"The Maya Indian word for sun is 'kohn'. And what is the Yakut word?"
"Kohn," said everybody else.
"Identical," said Alexandra, a woman with too-high eyebrows and hair piled up on top of her head.
"Exactly the same. You see? There are a thousand examples of this. The Russian word 'gora' (mountain) is exactly the same in our Yakut. The English words catastrophe, terrorist and apocalypse are all originally Yakut words."
I took an enormous bite of kebab, so I could not answer when Alexei Ivanovich asked me if I thought Yakuts were an Asian people.
"A few years ago one of our Sakha (Yakut) women was travelling in Japan," he said. "In Tokyo she became very sick, some kind of blood disease. She went to a hospital but when they tested her they said, 'We cannot treat you here. You have European blood and European genes. You must go to Germany for treatment.' In fact Yakuts are genetically only 30 per cent Asian. Do you know why this is?"
Half of my kebab had turned out to be hard white fat. It felt like I was like eating a flip-flop.
"One million years ago, before they became corrupt and declined, humans lived in harmony as one race. They built pyramids and understood how to control the energy of the sun. They spoke one language, called Sanskrit, and their civilisation was called Atlantis."
I glanced up to find Alexei Ivanovich looking at me. He seemed to be after a response. I tucked a piece of fat behind a molar.
"There's an Indian language called Sanskrit," I said. "Is that the same one?"
"Oh, no. The Indian version is only 20,000 years old. It's very young. The original Sanskrit is Yakut, the same language we Sakha people speak today. This is why so many Yakut words have equivalents in other languages. Yakuts themselves are the sole genetic heirs of Atlantis. Genetically, it has been proven that 92 per cent of our people are directly descended from Noah."
We fended off tiredness after lunch with a paddle in the Amga. It was a beautiful spot with a bend in the river and a sandy cliff on the opposite bank. While I swam Alexandra and Varvara popped into our tent to show Kathy pictures of sun flashes and tell them the story of Varvara's recently-deceased son who, as it turned out, had recently bested Jesus in a cosmic battle.
In the afternoon the bus driver, the white shaman and I rowed the heirs of Atlantis across the river in little rubber dinghies.
Once we had straggled up the hill top, two of the workers from the Northern Lights Tour Agency cleared a grassy circle. Alexei Ivanovich began talking about energy and the sun. There are places called chakras where the sun's power is highly concentrated. Amga is one of those places as, unsurprisingly, is Verkhoyansk, but the strongest chakra is in the Ural Mountains. When he looks into the sky above chakras, Alexei Ivanovich sees three cylinders, lit or blackened according to the make-up of energy in the place. The Amga chakra is 108 square km in area, 108 being of course the number of the future. Its cylinders are lit.
"Last year in this place we asked the spirits for snow," said Alexei Ivanovich, dropping batter cakes in a circle around the grass. The women around him muttered approval. They remembered the snow story.
"It snowed non-stop for three days."
He looked long at me again.
"Why did you ask the spirits for snow?" I said.
"We sensed that the environment was lacking snow."
A circle formed and Alexei Ivanovich walked around inside it, sowing handfuls of dry tea from a bag. He led a chant in Yakut language that went on for perhaps 15 minutes. Afterwards people milled around, raising their hands to the sun, staring wistfully into its rays or photographing it. The first time this happened I suggested Alexandra swing around so her photo wouldn't be all washed out. She looked at me as you look at somebody who is allergic to chocolate cake.
Alexei Ivanovich joined me on the walk down. It turned out he was the reincarnated Aristotle. He had also for one stint, long before his computer programming years, been an Indian Brahmin. I asked if he had enjoyed this. He said he was fonder of his time as Aristotle.
Rowing back, I ended up alone in my dinghy with a Sakha woman who, she said proudly, weighed more than 120kg. It was hot and she was sweating.
"Are you tired at all?" I asked, leaning to keep my end of the dinghy from popping cartoon-like out of the water. Her face lit up and I knew at once what was coming.
"Not at all. Not for a second," she said. "The sun here, you see. It's so strong, its energy is so powerful. I feel wonderful, young!"
Repressing all kinds of urges, I rowed on. There were no strawberries.

Dapparai

2006-09-06T12:38:00.000+09:00

war stories

2006-09-06T12:05:00.000+09:00

There were two misconceptions we failed to shake in our three days in Dapparai, a village of 200 or so hunters and dairy farmers on a grassy cliff above the Lena, midway between Daban and Olyogminsk. The first was that we had a video camera, or sometimes a film crew. "And where is the cameraman?" people would ask, on one of the two muddy streets.
The second was that we were German. You might not think this would be a hard thing to clear up, but it was. On the second evening, for example, I was stripping birch logs with the man we were staying with, an asthmatic pensioner named Anatoly Petrovich. I would work, partly out of English guilt because neither Anatoly Petrovich nor his wife, Klara Ivanovna, would accept payment while we were staying with them, and partly because the size and pace of Dapparai was such that there wasn't much to tire you out, and Anatoly Petrovich would sit on a log, wheeze, heckle the kids who spent their evenings galloping round on horses ("Red Indians!") and chat to an endless parade of neighbours. Usually we were discussed, which I could tell because although Dapparai is a Yakut village and Anatoly and Klara spoke Yakut among themselves and with their neighbours, the words 'kangaroo', 'Australia' and 'Kostya Tszyu' tend to be the same across all languages. Generally speaking, the looks we got in town were cold, but when we were with Klara or Anatoly it was a different story.
"If you were staying, you could have come on a rybalka [fishing trip] with me next week," said Arkady, who kept cows and worked a potato patch one plot over. "You could have told me how you hunt kangaroos in your country. I could have shown you how we drink here in Yakutia." There is a film - actually a series of films - in Russia which inadequately translate but are called special national hunt, special national fishing trip, etc. They are a bit like National Lampoon if you imagine Chevy Chase Russian and extremely drunk. At first I enjoyed these while K found them ridiculous, but we have both come to realise that they are, very nearly, true to life. Hunting trips are an excuse here for men to disappear with their guns and drink; fishing trips more so because there is less activity. In Olyogminsk an Evenki couple entertained me for hours with tales of fishing trip misadventures, including a man who three hours into his trip set his boat on fire, set himself on fire and staggered charred and naked back to his village, where his mother refused to recognise him because she claimed her son was on a fishing trip.
"We have the most enormous river fish," said Arkady. "Ah, it's great you've come. Wait a second. I'm going to tell my wife that some Germans are here."
Winter in Dapparai can be hostile. From December to February the temperature sits around -40 degrees Celsius, and the coldest days in January can drop to -55. The breeze which in summer keeps away the mosquitoes carries a bitter fog upriver. Anatoly and Klara live on bread, cottage cheese, jam, milk and keffir (a kind of sour yoghurt), all homemade. In winter they watch a lot more telly. Anatoly is saving for a satellite dish so he doesn't just have to watch Brazilian soap operas, which Klara likes, especially 'Talisman' and 'The Rich Also Weep', which this year is sadly not showing in Yakutia. A cart of cut firewood costs 3500 roubles, the same as a month's pension.
The main reason we have come to Dapparai is because in a book on the Russian Civil War (it was a long winter even in Irkutsk) it was mentioned as the site of a major battle. For war stories Anatoly recommended his elder sister, who lives with Anatoly and Klara in winter but in summer stays in her own place, a grand two-storey wooden house almost on the cliff top. A tiny set of reindeer antlers was mounted above the front door.
Yevdokia Petrovna served us lepyoshka, a Yakut batter cake, and tea as it's usually made in Siberia, poured from a strong pot, topped up with water and sipped with jam on a teaspoon. The radio on her kitchen table had the frequencies marked by city: Riga, Moscow, Tallin, Prague, Poznan, Bratislava. I wondered if they got Shakira in Poznan.
"The last time some Germans were here, they thought I was the president," Yevdokia Petrovna said. She was 73: 10 years too young to have seen the civil war - a messy kind of mopping up after the Communists had seized power in St Petersburg which in the far east dragged on more than a decade until the late 1920s. What she knew of the battle in Dapparai came from her parents. They must have talked about it a lot.
"Ah, it was terrible," she said. "It was spring 1922. Our revolutionaries were brave but very young, and in the village at that time there were very few of them. The whites were cruel, Tsarist officers mostly, but also some Tungus, Evenki. They were more than a hundred, but half of them didn't even know what they were fighting for. The whites arrived in secret in the middle of the night and set up in the taiga. The next day our boys rode out as usual, across an open field about three miles from here. The bandits didn't even confront them, just shot at them from where they were in the forest. Two of ours were killed, both komsomoltsy (young Communists) The one who was a Yakut was just a boy."
There were medals and certificates mounted on Yevdokia Petrovna's wall. She'd been a deputy of the local Soviet, a homefront veteran of the Great Patriotic War and helped commemorate the 100th anniversary of Lenin's birth.
"There were no telephones in those days, so a man rode into the village yelling 'they're coming!'," she said, "and galloped off to raise the alarm. After that the Red Army came riding on the ice from Olyogminsk. They chased the bandits across the river, and a few miles from here on the other bank our side won a great victory."
She poured more tea. "That was the worst that happened anywhere in our Russia until you lot came, the Germans."

middle Lena: Dapparai

2006-09-02T17:46:00.000+09:00

Daban

2006-09-01T18:45:00.000+09:00

middle Lena: Daban

2006-09-01T18:32:00.000+09:00

We came to Daban in a roundabout way. Our passenger boat from Lensk never arrived so we took a taxi, a roofed motor boat, with room enough for six, baggage and all the mosquitoes we could slay. On the motor boat we met Irina, a mining engineer living in Mirny, where there is a diamond mine bigger than Bendigo. Irina did not brighten when asked for tips on Olegminsk, where we were heading, the next town downriver. "It's a dirka," she said - a hole. She recommended Daban, where she was born, an hour or two before the dirka.
Daban was a village of a couple of hundred wooden houses, shifted up a grassy embankment in the 1960s after a flood that wiped out most of the lower town. In its grocery shop bread was sold by weight, prices added up by abacus. The kids' summer camp at the back of town had been set up in the ruins of a collective farm. There was no fruit and veg in town because the latest 'big water', a week earlier, wiped out the lower-lying vegetable patches. Across the river and on all sides around the village was thickest taiga, pine and fir.
One of the first people we met in Daban was Yuri Petrovich. He worked on a hydroelectric plant in Olegminsk but came back from time to time to Daban to hunt and fish. Two of his five kids had already left for the city, Yakutsk.
"The bears here are the biggest you'll find in Siberia," Yuri Petrovich said, pulling an enormous pair of binoculars over his fishing hat. "Enormous, black and legs as thick as pine trunks. There are often fires this time of year, so you're a good chance of seeing them when they come running out to the shore."
There are two kinds of days in Daban: drinking days and not drinking days. Thursday, when we arrived, was a drinking day. Friday was not a drinking day. Saturday was Ysakh - the biggest Yakut festival, officially to farewell winter (it was July 1) and cajole the elements into the usual favours for the summer harvest. Like most festivals it is an excuse to run around, eat too much and fall asleep in the afternoon. Saturday was a drinking day in Daban.
Ysakh began late because in the house where we were staying, with the lovely, pensioned Avgustina and Pavel, there was faffing. We ambled down to the riverbank, Avgustina and Pavel in their Sunday best, we in our cleanest trampwear. The driftwood from last week's big water lay 20m in from shore.
Tents had been rigged up over fir poles. An area around each tent was cordoned off with flag bunting, one area for each group of village families.
The ceremonial part of proceedings was over fairly quickly. There were some dances in various robes, my favourite 'the dance of the birch leaves', which fulfilled the two things I value most in dance, being both interpretative and swishy. A pile of pine kindling was doused with kumyss (fermented mares' milk) and torched. There was a demonstration of the khomus, a kind of jew's harp, which on this occasion was lost to the wind but which in the weeks to come I would grow to hate.
A hunter named Vasya latched on to me during the pole wrestling, in which you sit opposite your opponent on the ground, your feet on a plank between you, and attempt to pull him over by the wrists. Vasya wasn't about to pole wrestle anybody. He was drunk. It was not yet 11am and he was lucky to be able to speak. Like most people in Daban, Vasya was neither Yakut nor Russian. He had wide, deeply jaundiced eyes, a flat nose and brandy brown skin, about which the others liked to tease him. "He's a Chechen! He's a Georgian!"
"Don't listen to them, Paska. It's just because I'm drunk," said Vasya. For some reason he had taken to calling me 'Paska'. Each time I corrected him, "Mattvey," which is my name in Siberia, for when people can't say 'th'. A minute later he would tug on my elbow. "Paska, Paska". "No, Mattvey." It became our little game.
Vasya had just returned from a hunt. He would tell me all about it, in his way, he said, if his friend Artur didn't keep interrupting. Artur was somehow even more drunk than Vasya. He squinted at me, slurred and for long periods closed his eyes as though his brain was showing commercials. We established that he loved football. He watched last night's Germany-Argentina quarter-final, but the score was 1-1 when the power went out, which it does every night at 1am, not coming on again until 6. He was very taken with the German team, especially Jens Lehman who, he said, kept goal like a wolf.
Vasya said he had been hunting wild deer. He had his eye on an elk but lost the trail.
"You have to stalk an elk," he said. "Sometimes for days. They move quickly, but if you're fit you can follow them. One night I drank vodka. Only a bottle. But when I woke up I lost the trail."
We ate pancakes and river fish, including the delicacy 'osyotr', which has catfish whiskers and is pungent and fine. We drank kumyss. We participated in a circle dance, in which dancers in turn take up a song and which, when the circle is large and there are good singers, can go for hours.
"There are bears in this forest you know," said Vasya. "We get probably five or six of them between us in the village each year. I saw one on my hunt but it got away from me. Our bears here are enormous, the biggest in Russia. Huge black claws."
"Legs as thick as tree trunks?" I said.
"Oh, you know our bears?" said Vasya.
Artur leaned onto me, breathing vodka in my ear. "Miroslav Klose," he said, "is the greatest player of our generation. He runs like a female deer." I laughed at first, but then thought and found this true.
In the afternoon after the vodka there was volleyball. I went to find K who, while I was audience to the songs of the drunk, had been adopted by a pair of Yakut girls. Masha, who was 10, wanted to know what movie stars we had in Australia. Her friend Lena was a big fan of the pop star Shakira.
"What do her songs mean?" she said, looking at K with eyes that said she meant to memorise every word that was to come. We looked at her with sadness. "Not a single English-speaking person knows," we said.

upper Lena: Peleduy

2006-08-31T14:31:00.000+09:00

Soviet champagne

2006-08-31T14:11:00.000+09:00

Alright, so it's two days we've been back. Put the delay in posting down to weariness that's had us doing nothing for 48 hours but sleeping, showering and drinking Soviet champagne (amazingly not a description but brand name). Put the weariness down to two-and-a-half months on the road and to the seven kinds of paranoia that had me convinced the hiding place for our computer, slipped under the base of our thin ply wardrobe in our student hostel room, wasn't nearly cunning enough, and it was sure to have been nicked by the underpaid and corrupt security guards who work downstairs. While as it turned out, they'd only taken our TV. Which in fairness wasn't ours.

The nutshell version: K and I sailed down the Lena, carried on up the Lena (the hi-jinks! The naughty misunderstandings!) then took the long road home. There was foggy taiga, soggy tundra, priests, hunters, miners, drunkards and - I wish I were making this up - a camping weekend with the lost citizens of Atlantis. It's not like I have the energy or you the patience to recap, so I think it's best I offer excerpts together with some happy snaps over the next couple of weeks. Except for this first bit, they'll mostly be in order.

Last Monday

We were travelling platskartny on the long train back from Tynda. Platskartny is third class, where everybody gets a bunk but the carriage is open. Beds line the corridor and by the end of your trip you know everyone, particularly the young, the drunk and the frequent smokers.
Passing the birch forests some distance after Chita, we met a Buryat lady who fell into the first and third of these categories. Her Azerbaijani husband left her with a two-year-old girl, Sasha, with enormous black eyes. We chatted for perhaps a minute. Sasha pulled at the tablecloth and mashed our playing cards with her fists.
"Do you like my daughter?" said Sasha's mother.
"She seems lovely," said K.
"Good, I'm off for a smoke," she said. "Sasha - be good and play cards with Aunty Katya."
A little horrified, Aunty Katya and I did all we could to stop Sasha from crushing herself under the card table, pouring hot tea into her eyes and so forth. We managed, although there was a near thing with the nine of spades. Only when she returned, I think, did Sasha's mother realise we weren't Russian. This was the cue for a conversation in thickly-accented middle-school English.
"Hello."
"Hello."
"How are you?"
"Well, thank you."
"Pleased to meet you."
"Pleased to meet you too."
"Edward."
"No, it's Matthew, or in Russian, Mettvay."
"Edward."
Sensing an impasse, I switched to Russian.
"Edward is a boy's name."
"Right, of course it is. Where are you from? I mean, where were you born?"
"I grew up in England."
"And where's Canada?"
"Canada? Canada is next to America."
"Is it far from England?"
"Quite far, yes. I mean, there's an ocean."
"Have you been to Canada?"
"Never."
"Do you know Edward?"
"Who is Edward?"
"My sister married Edward. He's from Canada."
"Oh, Edward," I thought but did not say. "You should have said."

otyezd (n. departure)

2006-06-21T23:39:00.000+09:00

More on the blog? Why I make these promises is beyond me. No, of course I haven't put more on the blog. I've filled out forms, applications, handwritten letters to university rectors I am unlikely ever to meet. I've endured a long conversation with our dean's assistant in which she queried why, on the 12 or 15 past occasions we journeyed outside Irkutsk, we never asked for permission. I have hunted for maps, finding only one in all of Irkutsk for the Sakha Republic. I bought a stove. I have had my fire-mangled boots mended expertly by a man from the Caucasus.
What I have done in the last week I could go on and on about. What I haven't, you may have noticed. There was wrestling, in a paddock in driving rain, and at the very end of the wrestling there were eagle dances, where the victor wheels around the ring in a manner that is somehow both dignified and puncy. I've posted pictures, but for an account of some truly ludicrous mismatches you'll have to wait another day. There was a wedding, which I've alluded to and was planning to recap. Instead you'll have to settle for the knowledge that for both K and I, no future matrimonials we attend will be complete without a bear. There is the terrifying news that, after an unwilling encounter at the football, I'm now greeted enthusiastically whenever I run into Irkutsk's dozen or so white supremacists on the street. Yep, I'm in with the skinheads.

Enough to say, we leave tomorrow on an ambitious trip to the north. As far as possible, we hope to travel the river Lena, currently in flood but otherwise navigable in theory from a few dozen kilometres west of Baikal to the sea. More than that, we know very little. There won't be blogging until we return to Irkutsk, probably near the beginning of September. Stay good. Perhaps we'll bring you back a reindeer.

living here in Allentown

2006-06-19T22:29:00.000+09:00

I trekked all the way to the Angarsky bridge yesterday with my camera, only to find they'd painted over the bit of graffiti I was looking for. It appeared a couple of weeks ago in huge black letters, with hooks at the end of some of the letters like they do with 'Metallica'. It just read 'Billy Joel'. Yep, here in Siberia the kids are alright.

kanikuly (pl n. school or university holidays)

2006-06-15T17:14:00.000+09:00

University classes are over, which on the one hand means I do not have to spend three hours of my morning debating in a foreign language whether it is important to be wealthy, and on the other hand means I no longer get to see my middle-aged Korean classmate Mung Koo defend why it is important to be wealthy.
Travel plans are afoot, but I won't post them here after what happened last time, except to say: north. We're hoping to leave in just over a week. In the meantime I shall try to get more on the blog, which may prove difficult with my twin commitments of cooking twice a week and keeping up with the World Cup (Russian: chempionat mira po futbolu). A side note on that subject: after an incident on Saturday K and I have laid some ground rules for the World Cup, which is spread over three channels here with the time difference compensated for by replays in daylight hours.

Rule 1: we will no longer watch England games in the same room, particularly when I am watching and K is in front of the laptop with a full cup of tea.
Rule 2: if we overlook rule 1, we shall nevertheless respect each other's right to either shout during the football, or to be so unprepared for shouting during the football as to spill tea all over the laptop, whichever of these is our poison. This applies even if we have to buy a new keyboard.
Rule 3: we shall not attribute blame.

We think as a couple these rules will make us stronger.

dyelat pakupky (grocery shopping)

2006-06-14T12:12:00.000+09:00

dyen goroda (city day)

2006-06-14T11:58:00.000+09:00

I am no economist, but I think it is possible that Irkutsk's entire municipal budget is spent on prazdniks. The smell of beer and burning sulfur had barely dissipated after Victory Day when Dyen Gorada (city day) was upon us. Posters were strung down Karl Marx Street and along Lenin Street, flower gardens laid, emergency trips made for salted fish and moonshine. Irkutyanins gathered to toast the 345th anniversary of their town.
Normally Kathy and I are all for anniversaries, especially arbitrary and disputed ones. Sadly for us, City Day fell the day after we attended a wedding in which the first and last vodka toasts were 14 hours apart. We watched on television, alternating civic pride with stomach cramps.
The day kicked off with chess. Irkutyanins like to ease their way into these things. Following the chess was sand sculpture on the Island of Youth, which may not actually be an island but does have a bandstand and cheap cigarettes. The sculptors were apparently not hindered by all the broken glass. On Kirov Square a little later the mayor gave a speech on doing our bit to keep Irkutsk nice. I personally vowed to smash my vodka bottle less often on the Island of Youth. The mayor handed over to breakdancers.
The climactic event was I think my favourite, held on a small square of sand near the Lokomotiv Stadium. Irkutsk is for 7-8 months of the year a wintry Siberian city. It is more than 3000km from the nearest ocean. And this is why to me there is a streak of genius in marking its anniversary with beach volleyball.
Before you go making plans for future years, it's important to note there are some chronological distinctions so far as City Day is concerned. Last week's 345th anniversary refers to the founding of Irkutsk, as a Cossack fortress against the uncooperative Buryats in 1661. There is also the date on which Irkutsk was officially designated a town, which has in the past also been commemorated on City Day. This explains why Irkutsk celebrated its 300th anniversary in 1986, and presumably will toast its 350th in five years time and again in 2036. I hope this doesn't confuse anybody. Sculpt on, Irkutyanins!

kozyol (billy goat); koza (she goat); kozlyonok (kid)

2006-06-13T13:38:00.000+09:00

Have I mentioned our goats very much? They seemed to appear around our student hostel some time in autumn. We would pass them as we came home and would each break from our tasks - human and goaty - to look at each other. We wondered where they came from - if they were wild or owned - and why they always seemed to graze together, but never two days in the same location. Were they being very slowly followed? They wondered if we were too fast-moving to be chewed.
When autumn ended the goats vanished. Weeds shrank and disappeared beneath snow. Discarded refrigerator parts went ungnawed. We worried. We imagined the spring turning up four white carcasses, frozen jaws still clamped around bits of old piping. We kept an eye out around the fur stalls, hoping not to see four wiry new hides.
The winter was long and goatless. The day they returned, just a few weeks ago, was a song to my heart. They have reproduced in the winter, perhaps fortified by the nutrients in our bathroom plumbing. Now that the nights are warm and long they are out most evenings, imparting to their three new kids the basics of goatlife: the butting, the gnawing, how to put your forefeet onto a fence to properly strip the paint from the upper railing. We've resumed our little standoffs, this time with a mutual respect that comes from each having survived the winter. I appreciate their right to companionship. They know I'm not to be eaten. Death to saplings!

Saturday afternoon at the hippodrome

2006-06-12T17:32:00.000+09:00

otoplyenyeh (n. heating)

2006-06-02T13:04:00.000+09:00

The hot water came back on this morning, which was nice, as it had been six days and frankly, Kathy was beginning to turn. Before I go further I will say this: I understand municipal plumbing is not everybody's Audrey Tautou and albinos, but it has begun to interest me. And I think I've said before: there are websites for you people.

As with the regular heating, the hot water for all of Irkutsk is piped from the same plant. It's somewhere in the bowels of the city and staffed, I like to think, by tiny men in dungarees and Lenin masks. I am willing to accept there may not be dungarees.
Essentially, what this means is that the water for our morning shower is coal-heated sometime in the night by very tiny revolutionaries. It thunders through thickly insulated pipes and only after many miles and several hours, when the informercials (channel gorad) and pornography (RenTV) are ending, does it arrive steaming in our bathtub.
Because of the river and the problems with the cold, many of the pipes in Irkutsk run above ground. I think this has a certain grungy charm, but you may not agree if you do not like enormous rusting tubes snaking over your cityscape. Pipelines run under bridges, alongside the footpaths and even up and over the road.
Perhaps the main upshot of having all your water heated in the same place is that it puts everyone in the same boat - literally, except about the boat. You know when your water is going off because they announce it on the news. They don't need to tell you when the water is back on, because your pipes shriek and burble, as they did this morning, as though they are a contestant on narodny artist. But they do tell you, to be sure. And everyone gets very excited. And there is civic bonding.
Every July, we are told, Irkutsk pays tribute to it's stinky cossack forefathers* by going three weeks without hot water. I think this could be our generation's blitz.

*probably not really the reason

the height of rock

2006-05-30T16:52:00.000+09:00

The blogging has been so patchy of late I feel I owe some sort of recap.

In April, while I was posting pictures of my feet, a Petersburg man won my heart forever by waiting until just the right moment in his friend's birthday party to ask him whether he thought could break a brick over his head.

Just weeks after the first protest against the oil pipeline they're running north of Baikal, Vladimir Vladimirovich stepped in and ordered the thing diverted further north. Assuming you take this sort of thing at face value, this makes two out of two for protests in Irkutsk this year. Hooray for kind-of-democracy! Sadly we missed the victory party with the Bolsheviks, the muslims and the Communist Party, which for some reason reminds me of the river crossing with the chicken, the fox and the grain.

The sign below says: and you're silent?

Jesus Christ Superstar came and went from Irkutsk's state musical theatre. We caught the second-to-last show, learning for 120 roubles that Tim Rice doesn't improve in Russian, and that in Siberia today all you need for a standing ovation is an overweight Judas and half a dozen chorus girls in hot pants.

Almost at the same time, a man involved with 'Genghis Khan: the musical' called rock opera "the height of rock".

I learned about gerunds. Did you know these days they're called verbal adverbs? No? Me neither!

K and I visited Panorama, an Irkutsk nightclub in which we felt much safer when on entering they took away everyone's guns.

In Japan they're making a film about Cheburashka.

The Mrs World pageant in St Petersburg was, in my opinion, the best ever. They lost people's luggage, they voted for their own girl but then mistakenly crowned Mrs Costa Rica; they were rude to Mrs Canada, who complained afterwards that the whole thing had been reduced to a cheap reality show. In fairness, Mrs Canada seems not to quite have grasped the essence of the thing. I mean - reduced?
We celebrated in our own way by attending Miss Ir-geh-teh-oo, here at Irkutsk State Technical University. Like Mrs Costa Rica, our favourite, Varya, was cruelly upstaged by a rival frumpet in scarlet. My favourite part was when one girl composed a poem for the judges with the last line for some reason referencing aeroplanes. When the spotlight came on she forgot the words, stood for a minute moving her mouth up and down, then blurted 'aeroplane' and thrust a sponge cake at the judges.

False spring came, teasing us with a 29 degree day (plus!) followed two days later by snow. Only last week did the leaves come out on all the trees. The ice has melted, they've turned the hot water off, and the goats have returned. The goats!

Victory Day

2006-05-09T21:51:00.000+09:00

Dyen Pobedy (Victory Day)

2006-05-09T21:39:00.000+09:00

Most days, whether Kathy and I are attending the Miss Irkutsk State Technical University beauty pageant or a football match, there is a point in proceedings when something reminds me I am in Russia. This morning, I think that point was when the snipers came on.

The second world war is a big deal in Russia. Such a big deal, in fact, it's not called the second world war here but Velikaya Otechestvennaya Voyna - the great patriotic war. Russia's war started in 1941, just after Hitler meanly broke their non-aggression pact and invaded. But we don't talk about that. There were an enormous number of Russian casualties - the most of anybody - including a million in Stalingrad alone, and more than a million in the siege of Leningrad. Also, when they were liberated in 1945, uncounted thousands of Russian prisoners of war were sent to the labour camps because Stalin thought they were spies. But we don't talk about that either. There are films about the second world war, hundreds of them, like Svolochi, which failed to brighten our ill-fated trip to Ulan Ude. There are war memorials, many of them memorably ugly, in all corners of the land: from Kosh-Agach, marooned in the steppe of the Altai Republic, to Khuzhir, on Olkhon Island, to Ust-Ordinsky, where there is no running water but there is an enormous mounted tank. So it kind of follows that May 9, Victory Day, is the country's biggest prazdnik.

Kirov square was cleared for the parade. There were generals in jeeps. There was a marching band. There was the woman in front of us who had come all the way from Moscow and was stuffed if she was going to let a man with a toddler squeeze in and steal her view. The groups parading were introduced via loudspeaker: veterans, servicemen, officers, cadets, the police, the police-in-training. We greeted them with oorahs. This is our custom.
When the parading was done we were reminded that the great victory of the Russian people in their patriotic defence of the fatherland was achieved 61 years ago, and the band fired up for the national anthem. This is always a bit uncomfortable, I feel. The current anthem is the old Soviet tune, but it's been put to new words that nobody yet has learned. But for me the spirit of today's occasion was in no way tarnished by the humming.
After the anthem there was a short break while the band disassembled and the generals climbed down from their jeeps. Then the loudspeakers played the Final Countdown, by Europe, and the snipers ran on.
The snipers were probably the highlight of what was to come, but it was a close thing. There were men who leaped from moving tanks, rolled over the tarmac and mock-fired at the crowd. There were men who somersaulted over obstacles and landed in firing position without taking a hand off their rifles. Other men leaped over a flaming wall, fired blanks at the crowd, and demonstrated a psychological test which involved lying on the ground and letting a tank drive over them. The snipers won points for their full-body camouflage. It made them look like armed muppets.
It went on for half an hour. There was even fighting, Jackie Chan style, where there's a lot of running, a lot of arm movement and then suddenly someone's on the ground and someone else is running away. It kind of made me want to start a war. Afterwards we strolled along the riverfront behind the war memorial and we saw a four-year-old goose stepping.

демонстрация (n. demonstration)

2006-04-27T12:20:00.000+09:00

Since we lobbed in Irkutsk in September exactly two issues have stirred locals enough to take to the streets.
In February marshrootky drivers laid down their car keys and lucky charms after an Altai railworker, Oleg Shcherbinsky, was sentenced to four years in a labour camp. Oleg's crime had been to drive his family to a local picnic spot and fail to predict that their car, while indicating, would be sideswiped by the Altai governor travelling at more than 150km/hr. Silly Oleg.
"Today it's Shcherbinsky, tomorrow it could be you," said the marshrootky drivers, repeatedly. The marshrootky drivers were angry on Oleg's behalf, but also because they themselves spend a good deal of time evading the black BMWs which scream through Irkutsk traffic, flashing the blue lights which exempt them from road rules. Apparently if you are a bit short on political connections, you can buy these lights yourself in Russia for US$25,000. After dozens of similar protests up and down the country the courts agreed Oleg had been hard done by.
The second demonstration has been going on for a few months now, ever since an oil company announced it was laying a pipeline to China a few kilometres from Baikal's seismically active northern shore. Its prevention strategies in case of a spill amount to: "it probably won't happen".

These pictures are from this week's protest at the football stadium. I particularly enjoyed the ordering of the speakers. First up was the Imam of Irkutsk's near-invisible Muslim community, who handed over to the Communists, who introduced the Bolsheviks. I guess it's true that in opposition you can't choose your bedfellows.

an evening with Frank (and other Easter stories)

2006-04-26T20:11:00.000+09:00

Sometimes I love the Russian Orthodox church. Others say Easter with chocolate eggs and a sing-song. The Russians say it with a six-hour service equal in suffering to the crucifixion itself.

I popped in for the Saturday night service at Irkutsk's Krestovozdvizhenskaya (the Exaltation of the Cross or, if you like, Our Lady of the Seven Syllables) Cathedral. I was fashionably 90 minutes late.

11.15pm
The marshrootka driver drops me off at a footpath leading up from Lenin street. The church is a big church, as churches in Irkutsk go. It has five steeples topped with small blue domes. From its vantage point atop a very little hill it overlooks half of the stadium, a tramline and one of Irkutsk's more frightening traffic intersections.
Inside, the church is three-quarters full, although this is always a bit hard to judge. There aren't any seats in Orthodox churches and people tend to move around a lot, lighting candles and so forth. Standing listening to a liturgy are maybe 400 people, the men bareheaded and women in hoods and headscarves. Oil lamps are flickering in the belfries. Everything smells of candle wax and incense. I know nothing about Orthodox liturgy and church Slavonic is hard, so I can't shed much light on which particular bit the priest is up to, except to say that I have noticed that the Russian liturgy is divided into two categories: the mournful kind and the celebratory kind. The celebratory kind involves singing. This is the mournful kind.

11.40pm
Rather unexpectedly, the liturgy stops. The priests and altar boys bustle around gathering banners - an icon, a crucifix, the Virgin, the disembodied (and moustachioed) head of Christ. This disturbs me. I do not like Christ to remind me of Frank Zappa. Everybody digs out candle holders made from soft drink bottles.
We follow the priests outside. Tacked onto the enormous wooden doors is a sign about etiquette. It pleases me to think the Russian Orthodox church might have a liturgy unchanged in five hundred years, but it still has to tell the faithful to turn off their mobile phones.
We shuffle around the building perimeter. The church is in the middle of renovations and in any case not built to be lapped. We walk half the way along the footpath above the road; couples, kids, babushkas, men in suits and some in military uniform.
We walk in silence, except for the bells, pealing as though someone has died which... right, and the neighbourhood dogs, which are going mental. It is other-worldly and quite beautiful. People's hooded faces are lit by their candles. For some reason there are an enormous number of Armenians.
As we pass above the road we appreciate the views of the sports store 'Fanatic'. Drunks urinate behind the Lenina tram stop.

12am
The priests finish their lap and lead the way inside. It's now Easter Sunday and a small electric sign has been switched on above the altar. The sign is made from the same kind of fluorescent tubing you get in the West in chemists and video shops. Completely sidetracked for a moment, I consider why it is that in Irkutsk there is not a single video shop. I realise this is probably because of the healthy bootleg DVD market. I decide to pick up the interesting 'Brat' and Brat 2' when I have a chance.
The sign reads 'Христо воскрете' - 'Christ is risen'.
The liturgy resumes. This time there is singing.

1.15am
After two hours on my feet I need a break. I take my thermos and sit on the stone steps outside the church. Within a minute two militsia men stride over. The first has the kind of tone I usually associate with border guards and Bond villains.
"Why are you sitting down?"
"It's Easter. I've been standing inside this church for two hours trying to make sense of old Slavonic. Now my legs hurt and I want to sit."
"Ah, you're foreign. Where are your documents? Where are you from?"
What with the combined headiness of spring nights and Easter, I have forgotten my passport. I begin to put my case, hoping that in the minds of militsia men the spirit of Easter has more to do with forgiveness and less with arrests and torturing. I mention that I am from Australia. The eyes of the second militsia man light up.
"Do you know Kostya Tszyu?" he says.*
For half an hour the second militsia man and I discuss Kostya's last fight, a surprise loss against English welterweight Ricky Hatton. We also talk about the second militsia man's army days in Chelyabinsk, where recently there was a hazing scandal. The first militsia man wanders away. He seems slightly disappointed.

2am
Back inside, the priests and choristers are working in shifts. In your Orthodox service almost everyone is hidden behind the iconostasis (gilded altar screen), so you get only glimpses of priests and altar boys doing whatever it is they do when they're not singing at you in old Slavonic. From where I am standing I can see the shadow of the choir conductor. This is both interesting and slightly spooky.
In the foyer some of the Armenians have organised a trestle table. It is piled high with painted eggs, post-Lent kuhlich cakes and bottles of mulled wine. Ignorant and tired, I look forward to a morning banquet.

3.10am
The congregation has roughly halved since the beginning, although new people are still drifting in, looking Byzantine and crossing themselves. The liturgy is becoming familiar, with the same bits recurring. Sometimes I think I am on the brink of understanding. Other times I think some more about video shops. Now and then the priest appears and calls 'Christ is risen', to which everyone replies, basically, 'yes'.

3.40am
Just as I have devised an interesting scheme for bootleg DVD rental, the old women hustle off to fetch their food baskets. The priest emerges from behind the iconostasis with a silver bucket. As the babushkas scramble for position he begins splashing around a slightly murky looking liquid, sanctifying willy and nilly whatever gets in his way. The holy water plays havoc with the candles.
Only when everyone has had their food blessed can we finally go home. I learn there will be no banquet. Slightly disappointed and hungry, I leave surrounded by people clutching to their chests sanctified eggs and sanctified cakes and sanctified bottles of wine. For people who have been on their feet almost six hours, they seem a little too contented. I suspect the incense.

*Kostya Tszyu is the only cultural link between Russia and Australia, possibly in history. When cornered by strange and friendly Russian people, we are almost always badgered with boxing questions long before the conversation turns to the Sydney Olympics or kangaroos. Both Kathy and I are very literate on the topic of Kostya Tszyu.

пасха (n. Easter)

2006-04-22T11:13:00.000+09:00

We're six days into Holy Week which, to judge by greeting cards, is celebrated with much less enthusiasm than, say, the Day of the Defenders of the Fatherland.
Russian Easter is a week behind the Western church, of course. Normally I'd seize the occasion to wheel out my Julian Calendar bandwagon (made of wood and runs on the blood of heretics) but this time we're only seven days off and not the traditional 14.
Probably there's a reason for this. Perhaps the vernal equinox takes its time getting to Siberia. Perhaps the Patriarch lost a bet. I bet you can find out on the internet. Happy Easter!
The church services start around 10pm tonight. They'll run right through to Sunday morning in what promises to be a marathon of incense and murmuring. I will be taking along my thermos.

the cleanest town in Siberia

2006-04-21T15:57:00.000+09:00

On Monday, possibly in a bid to placate its embittered international students, our faculty announced an excursion to Angarsk.
I told our Chinese neighbour, Shun. Shun said, "It's the cleanest town in Siberia."
You'll remember that Shun is the man who thinks Irkutsk State Tech Mineralogical Museum is the best museum in Russia (me: 'You've not been to St Petersburg, have you?') so I took this with some reservations.
On Tuesday, our history teacher heard about the Angarsk trip. She said, "You'll love it. It's the cleanest town in Siberia."
First thing Wednesday morning we piled with 30 Mongolian and Chinese students into a school bus. Forty-five minutes jiggling our bones on the highway west and we were in Angarsk.
And here's the thing. Sadly featureless though the town was, and ruined though its biggest attraction, the clock museum, was by bossy and pedantic staff, we did notice how clean it was. The four-storey stucco apartment blocks, they were clean. The roads, they were free of syringes and industrial waste. The manholes, they were covered and secure. Each of these things set it apart from Irkutsk.
Only on the way home did we realise what probably keeps Angarsk's street-sweepers in beer money. Three kilometres out of town, hidden slightly from the road by birch forests, is Russia's second biggest oil refinery - run by Yukos, if signage is anything to go by. Its dozens of squat metal silos stretch for a kilometre along the roadside.
I understand 'oil refinery' is not everybody's leaning tower of Pisa, but why no one mentioned the second biggest one in Russia when they told us about Angarsk is beyond me. Is 'cleanest town in Siberia' really so catchy?
Trying to name this post just now, I think I've answered that question.

nerparium

2006-04-20T14:15:00.000+09:00

I think I've mentioned nerpas before. I may even have mentioned that Irkutsk has a nerparium, amazingly the first of its kind in the world. I have been niggling Kathy for months to go with me to the nerparium. On Saturday she gave in.

When we arrive a few minutes late the show has started. Our guide is a 20-year-old with a head microphone and remote control. She is finishing a spiel. In a tiled pool with roughly the dimensions of a wardrobe, two nerpas (Russian plural: nerpy) are bobbing, like seals but somehow... rounder. Our guide fingers her remote control. A tape player strung from the ceiling strikes up a tinny salsa.
We miss the introduction of the first nerpa, which to hand movements from our guide begins interpreting the salsa in a manner I have not seen since Russia's Dancing with the Stars. The second nerpa is Tito. We learn that he is named after Dennis, the first space tourist and not, as I had hoped, the much-loved Yugoslav communist. Tito is enormous. He is the Marlon Brando of nerpas.

When the salsa is over we learn some facts about nerpy. Nerpy are 50% body fat which, looking at Tito, is no surprise to me. They breathe through enormous nostrils, which open like blowholes then shut tight underwater. There are more than 50,000 nerpy in Baikal, which is 2000km from an ocean, and still nobody has worked out how they got there. I personally think they evolved from Nikita Krushchev.
"Now the nerpy will sing," says our guide, firing up the Soviet-era anthem Glorious Baikal, Sacred Sea. 'Sing', we realise, is nerparium for 'snort through their enormous valve-like nerpa nostrils'.
After the singing there is maths. Tito answers sums by splashing with his fused gunmetal grey nerpa flippers. For five minus two he splashes twice.
"He's a nerpa," says our guide. "He's not very good at maths."
The tape player kicks in for more dancing. The thinner nerpa thrashes, spins and leaps. Tito is the brains of the outfit. He twists a little. He is not so much with the dancing.
As the nerpy switch from waltz to lambada I get to thinking. The pool in which the nerpy perform up to eight 45-minute shows, five days per week, is no bigger than a shipping container. I feel this could have two effects. It could depress the nerpy, perhaps leading them to shed or increase their 50% body fat, according to their psychological make-up. Or perhaps something primeval within the nerpy could remind them that their natural home measures 630km from end to end. They might consider their tiny pool and believe not that their home has shrunk but in fact they have grown, somehow having evolved into a race of giant, immensely gifted supernerpy, dominating a strangely tiled Baikal.

The supernerpy play football. This is unconvincing.
Finally Tito is handed a paintbrush and we get what we have come to see. Tito chose to paint of his own free nerpa will, one day seizing a brush during a training session and letting loose on a nearby canvas. When he is having bad days, such as when he squabbles with his nerpa companion, Tito paints with bold, angry colours, sometimes even smearing the finished job in contempt with his flippers. Today Tito paints with yellow, green and red. He is having a good day.
An eight year-old thinks Tito's painting resembles a basketball match. In my opinion, she is mental. Tito's painting looks much more like Yevgeny Kafelnikov.

Kathy is yet to agree but I hope to make our outing to the nerparium an annual tradition.

think like a Siberian

2006-04-19T16:06:00.000+09:00

The referendum results are in. Still early figures apparently, but according to MosNews, nine in 10 Irkutsk voters gave the thumbs up and in Ust Ordinsky's formerly autonomous okrug, 98% voted yes and the only person to forget to vote was an unwell grandmother with anarchist convictions. I don't care about the politics here; the possible unfairness of the vote, the implications for Buryats and other minority ethnicities Russia-wide. All I can think about is - bridge!

ps. for those keeping count, Krasnoyarsk merged with the Evenki and Taimyr autonomous okrugs last year, not with Tuva. The mistake was made by a copy boy, who has been beaten.

referendum

2006-04-16T14:32:00.000+09:00

объединение (n. unification)

2006-04-16T14:22:00.000+09:00

Today is referendum day. I know because an enormous van just drove past reminding us to vote.
"I'm foreign," I yelled, hanging out our fourth-storey window. "My political rights here are limited."
Truth is, we cottoned on some time ago that today was referendum day. I don't know precisely what it was that made me twig: the nightly television broadcasts, the young folk canvassing at bus stops, or the fact that for months every square inch of available wall space, including within our student hostel, has been plastered with 'vote yes' material.
The referendum was Putin's idea. Russia is divided into oblasts (regions), of which Irkutsk oblast is one. Nominally outside the political reach of the oblasts are a number of autonomous okrugs (districts), named after the okrug's (sometimes) dominant ethnicity. Putin's Yedinaya Rossiya (One Russia) party began a few years ago to encourage dissolving these districts.
When Putin popped round to slander Irkutsk a few years ago ("dirty"), he mentioned by the by that Krasnoyarsk oblast, just next door to the west, was looking rather spanky in comparison.
"Do you know how they made everything so nice?" said Vladimir Vladimirovich. "They had a unification, with the Tuva Republic, and after that there was all kinds of investment and funding. You guys should do that too, with the Ust-Ordinsky Buryat okrug. Tell you what, if you do, we'll sling you some money for schools, kindergartens, hospitals and - here's the biggy - we'll finish the bridge over the Angara, the one they've been building for seven years."
The slogan most common around town is the slightly abstract 'думай по-сибирски' (think like a Siberian) which means 'vote yes for the merger'. Others are 'together we choose the future' (vote yes), 'unify Russia' (yes), 'don't miss the future' (yes, and don't sleep in on referendum day) and a host of blunt variations on the theme 'vote for the damn merger'. I think my favourite is a rhyme created especially for our university: 'referendum dela fsekh, tak schitayet polytech' (the Polytech thinks the referendum is everyone's business... vote yes). I like this because I am always more comfortable if I know where my university stands on the issues.
Putin's speech is replayed each night on TV. He is usually followed by the Governor's chief aide, whose urgings (do you want the bridge or don't you?) are for me somewhat dulled by the fact he looks like Leonard Cohen and seems to have been reanimated for the occasion.
So today the people (but not the foreign people) vote. The people of Irkutsk vote as well as the people of Ust Ordinsky, which to me seems rather like polling Russians on Chechnyan autonomy. Interestingly, Tanya, our occasional limpet, has just popped in and will be voting 'no', so perhaps not everyone will do as they're told. But will they get up on time? This is the question I have.

day seven

2006-04-11T17:03:00.000+09:00

Bolshaya Krupnaya Guba (big sudden inlet) river - Slyudanka (16km)

Katya makes breakfast with some of the leftovers anchoring our sankies. I contribute a can of sweetened condensed milk, the most important find of this trip so far as I am concerned. It is delicious with biscuits and the basis of an excellent rice pudding. Katya's second ingredient is pasta, which makes me worry our dinnertime advice that pasta can be combined with anything has been taken too literally. The result falls into the well-worn Russian category 'not as bad as expected', although it is a universe ahead of the meat and buckwheat of breakfasts past.

The night has brought a second storm, snowless but as fierce as Wednesday's. We wake, as is sometimes our routine, smothered in canvas with the important pieces of our camping stove lying outside in the snow.
The outer part of the tent is shredded. Everyone is surprised. It was held together with newspaper and everything. I help Dennis gather the pieces that have caught on nearby birch trees.
"The tent did its job," says Dennis. Except for its collapsing and occasionally letting snowmelt seep through bits of our sleeping mats, I agree.
"So, you just replace the plastic and the newspaper every year, then?"
Dennis looks at me as though I have just told him I would not like any pig fat with my pasta and condensed milk. "Why would we do that? We used the sheeting last time and it will be good for next year. Of course, we'll need some more sticky tape."
Our marathoning friends finish their pasta and trot off along the railway tracks.
"Build socialism!" says Katya. They promise to try.
The rescue guys have drilled our water hole. Besides chainsawing old railway sleepers for firewood and occasionally collecting people who have fallen through the ice, this is the rescue guys' sole function for the trip. In the mornings they snooze and drink coffee. Around lunchtime they load everything into their snowmobile and drive to where we will be spending the following night. In the afternoons they get on with their backlog of snoozing.
This morning they have thoughtfully drilled our drinking hole not in Baikal itself, where the water is purified by more than 300 species of very tiny crayfish, but in the thoughtfully-named Big Sudden Inlet river, which has goop. In the kernel of my brain, still keeping working hours despite the chorus of pain going on outside its windows, I am aware this may be bad. Eyeing the 400m walk to the lake proper and back, I shut my eyes and fill the thermos.
We begin walking at 10. I feel a flood of relief when Lena Stanislavovna announces the decision not to walk, as planned, two hours along the shoreline to the tourist camp at Angasolye. Instead, in exchange for a late lunch, we will cut directly across the ice to our finish point at Slyudanka.
By now, my legs are moving in a manner I had hoped not to experience for another 50 years; 60 if I'd played my cards right. Usually after I have exercised while unfit I need 10 minutes to shake the stiffness in my muscles. Today it is more than two hours. My feet, while retaining their essential beauty, are leprous stubs, covered with blisters I have treated by wrapping in bandages and ignoring for more than two days. Ulrich and Kathy are in a similar state, although their feet are not as naturally attractive.

Slyudanka materialises from the glare. The skifields rise to its east, where two years ago Vladimir Vladimirovich (Putin, to foreigners) payed a visit, taking the time to slander Irkutsk as "dirty" and its governor "lazy" and compare it unfavourably to fashionable Krasnoyarsk. In January here two French tourists died.
We walk on, resting five minutes per hour, following the tracks of the rescue guys' snowmobile. Slyudanka is a dirty town built around factories and the railway. Close enough to so that we can make out the power poles, the snowmobile tracks jag to the right. The rescue guys have approached the wrong end of town. This is fine for them but for us an hour's diversion. Mentally, I poison their coffee with river goop.
It is not quite three o'clock when we set foot on the shore at Slyudanka. We have walked 140km: three and a half marathons in six days. A 12-year-old who has finished the hike despite receiving sunburn on his eyeballs sits and cries on his sanky. There are a handful of other prone figures. Max celebrates by swinging his sanky around the ice. Sasha takes people for rides. Neither Kathy nor Ulrich nor I can move.

The trip back to Irkutsk on the local electrichka line is the first time in six days we have had any free time. We learn that Katya can sing. Lena Stanislavovna has a son in the army. Midway between Kultuk and Irkutsk, in the middle of the taiga, there is a funpark.
It is 8.30pm when we reach our station. As we stop to buy milk we are spotted by three leather-coated men. They each have a beer.
"What have you lot been doing?"
"Hiking," I say.
"Really? Only, we saw your red faces and backpack and sankies and wondered if you'd been to the theatre."
I look at the men. I am unable to decide whether they are being funny, or provocative, or neither. I realise that I do not care. Since a point midway through the afternoon when I stopped having to manually manipulate my legs, I have been dreaming of a bath and my bed. Kathy and I hobble up the steps of our student hostel and sleep for two days.

day six

2006-04-10T16:32:00.000+09:00

kilometre marker 115 - a river, somewhere (24km)

Despite it having been seven months since we arrived in Irkutsk, all wide eyes and refugee bags, still there are mornings when Russia feels a strange and fathomless land and Russians a species unto themselves, with their queuing and street faces and unnecessarily pointy shoes. This is such a morning.
"How are you doing?" says Maxim, a 16-year-old apparently fathered by the roadrunner. We have pulled our sankies 100km in four days and he is, I swear, jogging to catch up to me. I wait for him to add, "meep, meep" and evade an anvil.

"I'm alright," I say, lacking the strength to translate, 'I walk as a man made from lava.' "Bit tired, but not too bad. How are you, Max?"
"Great. Not tired at all. I've been near here before, a few weeks ago when there was a ski marathon. We raced from this side of the lake to the other side. 45km in 12 hours. It was great fun. I'm going to do it again by myself in a few weeks. In summer we're going to hike in the Sayan Mountains. Are you going to come and hike with us in summer?"
Keeping to myself my actual summer plans, which are to spend five months roadtesting the different ways not to go hiking, it dawns on me that Max is not the only one whose tune strikes a merry countermelody to my own. Except for a few of the younger kids and a teen or two with an obviously stiffened gait, there is nobody besides ourselves on this trek demonstratably feeling its effects.
In fact Sasha, the group oaf, spent much of yesterday towing kids around for larks on his sanky and this morning, Katya's begoateed boyfriend is carrying her rucksack while dragging his own sanky with her sitting on it.
It's clear to me these people are either denying their pain, or drawing their strength from the Russia gene, whose under-researched benefits also include immunity from vitamin deficiency and paperwork. I know which one my money's on.
The sun beats down all morning, but the air temperature is cooler and rather than push through the snow covering the ice on this part of the lake, our sankies are able to slide across its frozen crust.

Baikal narrows towards its tip, and in the mountains on the southern shore we can make out some of the settlements. Since yesterday morning, by far the most visible has been Baikalsk. In the shadow of snow caps, Baikalsk is best known for its pulp and paper factory, which belches waste into the lake and a permanent haze along the shoreline.
The factory was Krushchev's vision. He wanted to "put Baikal to work" because although it was a loyal lake which loved its country and went to all the parade days, rumours had reached him it was underfilling its quotas.
In the eighties the factory triggered Russia's first real environmental movement. This generated so much popular support the government was forced to strap on some filters. For years there has been pressure to close the plant, which in any case is apparently not that profitable. To judge by the smoke plume drifting towards us cross the ice, this hasn't happened just yet.
It's almost lunchtime before the sun burns through the snow crust. In moments the hike changes from a merry scoot (if you are Sasha) to a sorry trudge (if you are us) through six inches of snow and slush. Several of the boys decide this is the signal to remove most of their clothes. They make a pink and raggedy column of army pants, dog tags and handkerchiefs with eye holes. The girls decide full upper-body nudity is undignified, so they will walk in their bras.
We keep our clothes on as changing them would involve stopping and then somehow reactivating our limbs. Also, it is two degrees above zero.
"Matthew, do you have your camera ready?" says Lena Stanislavovna. "There's something very interesting ahead."
"Bras?" I ask.
"No, no. Some of the most famous dachas on Baikal. The first one we'll see is the biggest. It belongs to the Minister, and is sometimes used by the Governor of Irkutsk province. It has eight satellite dishes. Eight! You might want to take more than one photograph."
Instead, I take this:

For our last night we camp by one of Baikal's countless feeder rivers. The tent is shaping much as I feel. Bits of plastic have torn loose since the storm, and several of the newspaper articles are becoming unreadable. This seems to me one of the downsides of newspaper as outdoor shelter material. It's alright for holding your tent together, but what happens when it's snowed all night and you want to read the obituaries?
Potatoes are peeled and carrots and onions already on the boil when a freezing wind begins whipping into the valley. Over a hill first one and then two men arrive, bounding over the earth in running shoes and tiny backpacks.
They are marathoners, as it turns out, for we are in Siberia and this is the obvious occupation of two men in the middle of nowhere, at 9 o'clock at night, with no supplies and no means of shelter. They have light sweaters in case it turns chilly. They are heading for Slyudanka along the railway line.
"Want some food?" asks Dennis, after handshakes all round, except with the women, whose hands, though pretty, are to be admired rather than shaken.
"Of course, yeah!"
"Want to sleep in one of our tents?"
"Great, yeah!"
The first marathoner has a '1917 Bolshevik revolution' flag sticking out of his backpack. The second has a flag with a dove of peace.
We are far too tired to question them further.

Tomorrow: THRILL at the end of a journey! LAUGH at traditional Russian wit! WITNESS a small child's pain!

day five

2006-04-09T08:58:00.000+09:00

cape Tolstye - kilometre marker 115 (28km)

We wake after the storm to a clear sky and perfect stillness. From our camp high above the rockface we can see the morning sun lighting the snow peaks on the western shore. I enjoy this as I poo on the railway tracks.
For the next two days, we will be following the krugo(circum)baikal railway. When it was finished roughly 100 years ago, the krugobaikal completed the original Trans-Siberian line. Before, the tour companies had problems selling their 'Moscow-Vladivostok, except for a little bit' packages.
The autocratic and bearded Alexander III built the line using Italian labourers (in time they were discovered to be a poor choice of building material and replaced with bricks). They blasted across rockfaces and tunnelled through cliffs, laying a line almost 100km across the kind of terrain that, if you were shown it while the Italians were in another room, would cause you to laugh and smash a vodka bottle, praising the famous Russian wit.
The sad part is that, after barely a half century in service, the krugobaikal was abandoned. Plans were approved for a hydroelectric station in Irkutsk, a new railway was needed elevated above the river level and, rather than mess around on the Angara, they ran a new, sensible line direct to Kultuk on Baikal's southwestern toe. A railway to nowhere, the krugobaikal had one of its tracks torn up and was spared its other one only because planners decided there was an off chance it might be used. It is unclear if the planners added "...by berry pickers, mushroom hunters and daytripping Russian tourists," but this is what you get if you leave yourself open to history.
If you like grandiose engineering and railway tunnels, which on both counts I do, it's one of the finest examples you'll see.

The day's hike begins with the unusual sensation that my legs have been buried for thousands of years and become petrified. I deceive them into movement with promises I am aware I cannot keep. We are late starting and I am not the only one banging on about the railways.
"You know Matthew, there are 33 tunnels," says Lena Stanislavovna. "The longest one's over 80 metres. It was such a rough job to build. Did you know they did it in two years? How's your mood this morning?"
"Alright," I answer, and immediately feel untrue to myself.
"We'll have our first break in an hour. There'll be a hill where we stop. You should climb it and take a photograph. You'll find it very interesting."
Now master of the 'th' sound in my name, Lena Stanislavovna has been keen for me to climb and photograph many things. Since Listvyanka I have made a rule of declining on account of the paralysis gripping my lower limbs. This in no way impacts Lena Stanislavovna's enthusiasm. When we round the next cape the side of the hill is on fire.
"Often happens at this time of year," she says. "You should take a photograph. There's no snow on the hills anymore and the ground underneath is completely dry. When there's a strong sun it's perfect for burning. Right now, the sun is strong."
This is true. Since day two the sun has shone almost continually, and the faces around us are monuments either to its strength or hugely inadequate skin care, or both. My own nose has the distinction of having burned not only on its regular outward extremity but on the underside, the sun reflecting off the ice and scorching my nostrils. Several of the Russians have dealt with the problem by sacrificing their handkerchiefs, like so:

I think you'll agree the menace of the cut is offset almost completely by the lily pattern on the material. Kathy and Ulrich have chosen a different approach, folding little squares of tissue paper to tuck beneath their sunglasses. The result is that at various points on the trek I have the impression of being followed by two large, black-eyed birds.
I have opted for the full-head wrap. Beneath Ulrich's ski goggles, which I have borrowed after having somehow lost both a scarf and my own sunglasses, I wrap Katherine's scarf around the entire lower half of my face. This makes me feel both mysterious and clammy.
It is an exhausting day on the hike. We press on for almost 10km further than usual.
"We're putting in more today so tomorrow will be easier," says Lena Stanislavovna, skipping up alongside me with an inhuman vitality. I shoot her a look of withering disbelief. I realise the look is not going to work with the scarf.
A 12-year-old named Kolya walks beside me for a time. With identical questions to a q&a we shared near Bolshye Koty, he asks me how many times I've been to Baikal and where I've been. When I'm finished, Kolya says, "So, are you from Australia? Because, one of my friends says you're from Austria and we have a bet."
I clear up for Kolya the Mozart/crocodile hunter issue and he trots away. I realise his friend is Yelena, who seemed confused a few days back when she sent a smattering of German our way and we weren't altogether forthcoming.

The sun is already low ahead when we find a vehicle road on the ice, probably linking Listvyanka with some of the dachas on the southern part of the lake. It's compacted snow and ice and compared with the last five days, very easy going with the sankies. Even so, 7pm has passed by the time we make camp high above a pebbly beach and before Kathy and I can get dinner underway the sky is growing smokestack dim.
Drying socks and shoes is as usual something of a priority. After viewing the blisters on the toes of my left foot, I spend half an hour remodelling my boot into something more resembling 'boot'. I settle for 'clog'.
We serve dinner by torchlight. Besides compliments, there is general surprise that we have combined fish and vegetables and pasta without so much as a thought for cheap, processed lard-meat.
"Fish and pasta: I didn't know that could be done," says Katya, our group's regular chef.
We explain that almost anything can be combined with pasta including, as Armando Ianucci has pointed out, canned tomatoes plus any single vegetable for an acceptable evening dish. Katya is thoughtful. My heart knows she is wondering whether tushonka counts as 'any single vegetable'.

Tomorrow: 1917!

day four

2006-04-08T15:38:00.000+09:00

Listvyanka - Cape Tolstye (22km)

The morning of day four is like waking on Survivor the morning after tribal council. I know this from hearsay, not from having become hooked on Survivor just about the time Rupert began talking to coconuts and stayed, to lasting self-disgust, for every tortuous minute of all-stars. Hearsay.
Anne 'second syllable' the Finn has departed as planned, reducing our foreigners' brigade to three, and our group - our group is a shattered group. The hike's second teacher, Galina Feodorovna, was wrecked by day two and has left in the night for Irkutsk together with Slava, our fix-it boy, who it turns out is her son. By counting the empty places at breakfast we learn that overall 15 others have quit, including the eight Russian members of our group.
Over buckwheat and tushonka I take some encouragement from this. I have spent half the morning patching blisters but at least we are not the only ones finding things tough. Only as the purple block juice is served do I realise the probable consequences for the rest of the trip if we have only now shed ourselves of the weak.
We load sankies at 9.30am. For the first time we hike not along the shoreline but out across open ice, to an enormous cape (named Tolstye, I am pleased to report, on my map - Cape Fat) from where the lake turns west towards the Tunka valley. All day, when we glance back, we will be able to identify Listvyanka by a single building: the sherbet yellow, eight-storey, unevenly balconied hotel nearing completion next door to the school building. Oh yes, it's attractive.

Listvyanka was a fishing village before folk from Irkutsk came and built their dachas, expanding the town along the lakefront. Most people stopping off on the Trans-Siberian these days make their way here for a view of Baikal, a museum filled with luminous, pickled things from the deep, a fish market, a couple of caged bears and a de-antlered moose named Martha. Oil and gas money is most likely behind the dachas which keep popping up on the hill fronts. There is a walled castle complete with functional turrets and - my favourite - a candy pink church/palace that I like to think is tribute to the work the guy who built St Basil's did after Ivan the Terrible ripped his eyes out.
We make steady going on two or three inches of snow. The snow is fresh but even and the ice below is almost perfectly flat, a first for the trip. To our right the Angara, unfrozen, pours out towards the Arctic Ocean: the only river to leave Baikal.
It's more than four hours before we rejoin the shoreline. Trying to distract from the pain in my heels and calves and where the belt has broken skin on my thigh bone, I work out a way of judging distance by measuring the mountains with my sunglasses. I wonder if I am on the cusp of invention: perhaps like trigonometry but useful. I realise I am at greater risk of eye burn.
At 2pm we make a camp fire and meet the brigade we will join to form our new group. They are a brigade of eight, not nearly as cosmopolitan as our brigade but better with tents. They have a leader, Dennis. Dennis wears his camouflage trousers slightly too high and reminds me of Kostya Tszyu. We mix tushonka with potatoes and soup spice. Dennis uses a hunting knife to stir in the pig fat.
Dennis's brigade keeps to itself. This is fine with our brigade. We are rationing our energy and we have realised speaking costs us calories. If our brigade wants anything, we will blink.
The afternoon passes under windless skies.

Towards 6pm we round Cape Fat, towards which we have been walking on and off for almost nine hours, sadly oblivious to its amusing name. The lake opens before us, a series of smaller promontories before another huge cape, pale in the distance. On this side a gale is driving the snow from the ice. We slide into camp from various directions.
"Take a stone, heat it in the ashes, then just pop it inside your shoe," says Dennis. He is explaining how to dry my boots, which, like most people's, are drenched at the end of each day. "An hour or so and they'll be fine."
I try the stone procedure on Kathy's boots, remembering that self-sacrifice is one of the cornerstones of a good relationship. Her boots seem to survive. I pop stones in my boots.
After dinner we wash our tushonka and pasta down with a thick, sugary tea. To our giddy delight which we mask, for dignity, with faces of dried-out exhaustion, we learn that our new group comes equipped with a tent which has a stove. Not the kerosene stove of our old group, which mocked its forefathers with its weak, heatless flame, but a wood-burning stove with chimney and metal bit for the tent roof. While we set the stove and secure (oh, words) the tent with ski poles and newspaper and rope, Dennis gets the weather forecast on his mobile phone. The night will be -3, and the next day close to zero. There is the possibility of snow.

I wake around one in the morning. In my sleep I had been half-convinced I could hear the snow hitting the outside of our tent. When I open my eyes I am sure. The roof pole is lying across my knees. Canvas is flapping inches above my face. The wind is a roar. For the next three hours I lie half asleep as the storm crashes on. At one point the stove collapses, and I roll into my sleeping bag, brilliantly abrogating responsibility by mimicking a deep-sleeping foreigner. The chimney falls across the roof, then rolls into the snow. Dennis ties the door shut with boot laces.
The wind stops. and there is silence for a moment. Then, out on the ice, the storm hums and rises and comes hurling towards us. We wake up semi-smothered under fabric like parachutists.
As we pick ourselves clear in the morning I find my left boot some distance from where I had left it. I check it for dryness. The underside toe has melted into a corrugated pattern. I refuse to accept this as penance for letting Dennis look after the stove.

Tomorrow: what Italians are good for. Why we don't know anything about Mozart.

day three

2006-04-07T14:26:00.000+09:00

Bolshie Koty - Listvyanka (30km)

"Do you have tushonka in Australia?" a teenager named Liza asks me, as we stir lard-clotted mystery meat into our breakfast.
"Oh yes," I reply. I do not add, "it's for cats."
Liza is in our group. To simplify things on the hike, we are divided into groups and also, within groups, brigades (Russian: brigad), of which Kathy, Anne, Uli and I are one. Other brigades are assigned to specific tasks, such as getting the fire going, cooking, making sure there is enough newspaper on the tent. Not our brigad. We are a brigad unto ourselves.

The wind is full in our faces when we leave after nine. We haul our sankies through six inches of heavy snow. It is two hours before we come in view of Bolshie Koty, small and churchless on the flats of a frozen river. In the centre of its bay we stop for a rest. As our brigad believes that no brigad member is an island, entire of itself, and that the death of one brigad member diminishes us all, in our case by a minimum of 25%, we share our drinking water around.
That is, we try.
"Nelzya!" says Lena Stanislavovna. "Drinking not allowed."
"Why not allowed?" we ask. We are also an inquisitive brigad and thirst after knowledge.
"It's cold water. Very bad for your throat. Not allowed!"
Lena Stanislavovna is 50 years old and indestructible. She was born in a village on the rail line to Bratsk, the daughter of a man who built trains and a woman who made stoves and - probably - repelled single-handedly a regiment of Nazis. On leaving school she travelled two days west to a teaching institute in Tomsk, making her the third person I have known to have graduated in a place named after a Womble. She has two gold teeth (which is nothing on one of our rescue guys, who has the full set) and small black eyes which glint as she talks to you. In my case this is frequently, as I am the only foreigner whose name she has remembered. If you are not fit to the degree where everything is so tightly honed you are liable to pop an eyeball, she is a very bad person to be leading your hike.
"Matthew," she says. "You know we're running a bit behind. By this time last year we were halfway to Listvyanka. The best thing is to work hard today to make sure we make up the time. It won't be too much trouble. If we skip lunch we should be in Listvyanka by three."
This is the first lie.

We march on, brigades and groups, our enormous Russian flag and one tireless ginger dog, a foundling from the east coast of Baikal. 3pm passes. My afternoon brightens when I develop a method of moving my sanky forward which requires the movement of none of the joints in my legs. Two thirds of the group is obviously flagging. The other third is personified by Sasha, a 17-year-old bear-man who has been ahead of me all day. Sasha walks with fists at his side and his sanky rope knotted carelessly around his shirt, for he feels no pain. His grey woollen beanie he wears high on his head, for he feels no cold. Sasha regards the frustration and weariness of others with interest, for although his emotions are simple, he enjoys the quirks of his fellow man. If I was working in French period cinema and casting village oaf, I would cast Sasha. At 4pm my belt snaps. 5pm passes.
"The first two days are always the hardest," says Lena Stanislavovna, materialising out of the snow alongside me and mistaking my look of unfocused resentment for welcome.
"Some of the later days will be 15, even 10 kilometres. Easy. We'll be setting up camp sometimes at three in the afternoon. Last year people had time to climb a mountain."
These are the second, third, fourth and fifth lies.
5.30pm has passed before we round the last fir-covered false cape to Listvyanka and it is six before the town finally swings into view: observatories high on the hills, the roasted skeletons of ships and factories; a hotel which would once have become the most tasteless building in Listvyanka had it not been built too close to the cliff edge and abandoned to become the most tasteless ruin in Listvyanka. We haul sankies onto the pebbly beach behind the fish market.
Later, as we manouevre our legs onto camping mats in the local school's basketball hall, listening to the interesting sound they make resonating off the pine, Lena Stanislavovna comes over for a chat.
"Matthew, do you have purple block juice in Australia?"
"I believe we do not have purple block juice in Australia," I say. "And, physically gutshot as I am, I would like you to tell me what it is."
"Purple block juice," says Lena Stanislavovna, "is a block of what to the foreign eye looks like purple soap. It is rock hard but when you carve it into a saucepan and add boiling water, the result is juice as though God himself had squeezed it from his orchards. You must try purple block juice."
I have tried purple block juice. Purple block juice tastes like unset jelly.

Tomorrow: how to turn good, wet shoes into bad, dry shoes. What is the sound of one tent flapping?

day two

2006-04-06T11:52:00.000+09:00

Bolshoye Goloustnoye - not quite Bolshie Koty (20km)

We wake in a classroom, under a board reading 'geroi nedelyi' - 'heroes of the week'. Andrei is geroi nedelyi for his breakthrough work with the timetable. Outside in the corridor the majority of our hiking group is running up and down shrieking. Somehow we have expected a mix on this trip of families and regular folk. In fact it is us, a dog, three rescue workers, two teachers, and 50 of their students, aged 10-22. We decide Marina has used the subleties of language to deceive. We forgive her when she brings us carrots.
At 8.30am we head for the river Goloustnoye, a short cut to the lake.
The buckwheat, sleeping bags, six kilograms of mashed-up cow parts and so on we pack inside a rucksack. The rucksack we lash onto our sanky (sled, but you'll agree sanky is the better word) with all the rope we have and all the scout knots we remember. I remember the always-functional 'many times' knot. (I once knew sheepshank. Was sheepshank useful?) I hook a rope from the sanky to the canvas belt around my belly.

Look closely here. I am merry.

The first hour is mayhem. The ice on the river has formed slopes, making it almost impossible to pull a properly weighted sanky. Our sanky, while glinting attractively in the early morning sun, is weighted like Gerard Depardieu. By the time we skip out onto the lake, an hour in, the sanky has tipped a handful of times, had its ropes re-tightened and been given several good talkings to. On top of this, our koshki (crampons) have developed a tendency to stay behind us in the ice every 20 minutes or so. We solve this as we now solve all problems: by strapping them on with rope.
I fall in behind Slava, a cheery, camouflage-wearing, born-up-a-tree-with-the-secret-of-fire 16-year-old, and Lena Stanislavovna, a maths teacher. Fields of ice blocks a few hundred metres in from shore keep us hugging the coastline. It is four hours across snow and ice before lunch.
"Last year we were here by 10am," says Lena Stanislavovna.
In mid-afternoon a field of torosy widens before us. It is kilometres across. There are cliffs on the shoreline. On approach, my sanky tips lamely on an ice crack. The sanky and I exchange words. We agree it will need to work harder.
The torosy is, basically, agony. Every 15 metres or so is a process of walking backwards over ice blocks, manually hauling your sanky which would otherwise flip and in any case often still does. After almost an hour I have sore arms, sore calves and a sanky whose runners have ripped partway away from their frame. My mood is not lightened by descriptions of last year's hike, when it was 'ice and good winds all the way'.
"Last year we were way past this point by lunchtime," says Lena Stanislavovna.
Late in the afternoon it becomes clear we are not going to reach our camping spot at Bolshie Koty. Lena Stanislavovna is concerned. My sanky and I do not care. We are striding along snow-dusted ice, a thousand miles an hour with a gale at our backs. We pass the lads with the giant Russian flag.
"Which country are you representing?" I ask, trying a little joke. "It's Russia," they answer. "Right," I say.

The sun is low when we turn towards shore. Crossing a single line of torosy, where one sheet of ice has pushed up against another, I feel a pull on my sanky as if it has snagged on an ice block. I look back as I haul it clear. There is a new hole in the ice and the back of my rucksack is dripping slush. I head to shore before I can think about this much.
We will share our tent with the 8 other people assigned to our group. The tent has an inner lining and a pot-iron kerosene stove which, although heavy and unforthcoming on the key issue of heat, will require us to rise in shifts to tend it in the witching hours. The outer part of the tent is painters' plastic sheeting held together with newspaper. The tent is secured by our ski poles, which we use each night to force new holes in the sheeting and tie down with rocks.
As we get the fire going, there is a call on the rescue guys' CB. They roar off in their snowmobile with their dog. They are exactly like Kathy's current favourite Austrian TV drama, Alpysky Patrul. When they arrive back they have Marina. She is wearing somebody else's clothes.
"Fell in," she says. "Up by the torosy. In to my chest. The only thing that stopped me going under was my ski poles."
We offer her vodka until the fire gets going. A look of shock comes to Marina's face.
"Have you given some to the spirits?" (Marina is, you'll remember, a Buryat - although it's not only Buryats round here who will fuss about whether the spirits have been placated).
"No," we say. "We haven't opened it yet."
Afterwards, warming up tushonka, we see that Marina has taken a cup of water and is sprinkling it around the campsite: on trees, on rocks, in gullies. "Very bad," she is saying. "Very bad."

Tomorrow: why you shouldn't drink water. How to make juice from a soap block.

what we did on our holidays

2006-04-05T15:17:00.000+09:00

The Sunday morning before last, Kathy and I left for a seven-night, six day hike, starting from Bolshoye Goloustnoye, partway up the west coast of Baikal, and pulling sleds to Slyudanka, in the south. Here is a map of the route on which, due to scale, not all geographical features are represented:

These two days past we've spent lying in bed, sometimes getting up to rub cream into our sun-scorched faces but for the most part almost literally unable to walk. I promise you, it will be much more fun vicariously.

Day 1: Irkutsk - Bolshoye Goloustnoye

The night before we leave the clocks go forward, so although it's only 8am when we catch our tram for the Irkutsk Institute of Agriculture, to us it's an ungodly 7 in the morning.
Ulrich, Katherine, our Finnish friend Anne (accent the second syllable and it sounds more Scandinavian and less Famous Five) and I are together. Anne is along for two days, Uli, K and I for the whole shebang. We wait outside rusty iron gates opposite town hospital no.3, built the year Stalin died and still sporting hammer and sickles. I would like neither of these things, even as emblems, in a place doing operations on me. After my experiences in the polyclinics, I would put it past no Russian doctor to begin surgery with the words, "We'll just hold you still with this curved, shiny blade, and then..."
In the week preceding the hike we have worked through an enormous shopping list. We have the hiking essentials: a cheap aluminium sled topped with wooden slats, ski poles, rope, sleeping mats, sunglasses, a half-remembered competency with knots. The bulk of the food is as follows:

12 cans tushonka (processed meat)
9 cans sweetened condensed milk
1kg grechka (buckwheat)
1kg rice
1kg yellow porridge/cous-cous crossover
2kg pasta
2kg potatoes
4 cans fish
12 pkts soup mix
4kg croutons
4kg chocolate

Noteable I feel in hindsight are the absences of fruit and vegetables and the dearth of alternatives to meals founded on meat processed of its identity and goodness, trucked to Ulan Ude, rolled in pig fat and squeezed into anonymous tins with a picture of cow on them. Stamping our feet in Irkutsk's blackening snow at 7.30am, the chocolate seems most important.
The main debate among Uli, Anne and K and I has been over footwear. Not so much our boots, which are fine, but what to stick under them so that we stride over the ice more in the manner of, say, Roald Amundsen than, say, Pingu. Marina, our contact for the hike and one-time host in Bolshoye Goloustnoye, raised the topic a few weeks back.
"You'll need spikes, of course"
"Right. The kind that clip on the underside of your shoe?"
"No, little ones are better. Just individual spikes, 1-2cm."
"Do you know an outdoors or camping shop where we can pick them up?"
"Won't need that. Any hardware shop will do."
"Hardware... wait. We're talking... screws?"
"Screws, yes. I thought you understood this."
"You just screw screws into the underside of your boots?"
"10-12 in each boot will do the job"
"But don't the boots break?"
"Sometimes, sure."
Anne has opted for the screws. Somewhat mutinously, Uli, Kathy and I have bought crampons (koshki in Russian - little cats). We figure koshki may not be as ideal for the conditions but probably won't result in shredded boots and screws halfway up our bone marrow. On each of these counts we will be both right and wrong.

Tomorrow: the hike begins. How will the koshki fare? What holds together the worst tent in the world?

smokers' corner

2006-03-24T15:43:00.000+08:00

At the classy end of your Russian cigarette market are foreign brands (Marlboro), quasi-foreign brands (More) and cigarettes named after Peter the Great. The most expensive packet of 20 Parliaments sets you back 48 rubles (A$2.30), the same price as a street-side serve of bliny. Guess they gave up regulating tobacco after Gorbachev's efforts with alcohol. At the other end of the scale are these four brands:

belomorkanal

The cheapest in the land at less than 4 rubles (A$0.15) per pack of 25. Technically not cigarettes but papirosi, a Russian word describing a tube of cardboard with rough tobacco packed into one end. The brand means 'White Sea Canal', which history buffs might recognise as the Gulag-era project that worked uncounted millions to death. Tasteless? Hey, it's not like they're nice cigarettes.

prima nostalgia

A few extra kopecks buys you cigarettes sans cardboard tube, but no filter. Each smoke recalls fondly a man whose seven years in power left the country recovering from one major famine, on the brink of a second and with a secret police moulded into a hugely effective killing machine. Also available (really): Stalin brand. Now that you think about it, weren't things nicer in the old days?

TU-134

Another couple of roubles and suddenly you're smoking actual, honest-to-Moses filtered cigarettes, christened in honour of Andrei Nikolayevich Tupelov, the man who invented Aeroflot's finest and the TU-134 of Soviet aviation and now cigarette packet fame.

nevsky

Well into the middle range at eight rubles (A$0.30). Not as popular as the other three, but we've always found it hard to say no to a lithograph. Named after the river in St Petersburg, the consumption of which I imagine would be equally bad for your health.

an un-marxist thaw

2006-03-23T10:29:00.000+08:00

Spring, he is come, at least to judge by the near constant sunshine and the rivers of melting snow. Of course, this isn't the case for everyone.
If, like ourselves, you're facing south, the sun and the swampy expanses are yours, plus iceless walkways and last year's rubbish, seeping out of the snow like pus from a pimple. It's the most beautiful season, I promise you.
But if you face north, you're still in the season of ice, and you'll probably curse those south-facers, like us, as you skate involuntarily from your doorway into a snowbank, perhaps wounding yourself on a newly revealed car part. But you'd be wrong to curse, because we south-facers aren't bad people, just privileged, and we always welcome you to visit.

KOSHka (n. female cat)

2006-03-22T12:21:00.000+08:00

Yesterday on the fourth floor of our architecturally frightening student hostel there appeared a cat. It was a nice cat, blue eyes, the siamese kind. We let it wander around our apartment, then when it weed behind our bath we threw it into the corridor. Such is our way with visitors.
Still unclaimed by evening, the cat was taken in by two of our Korean neighbours who, I will add, are sunshine in my life, from the girl who thinks I'm heavy to our middle-aged male classmate who grunts through tae-kwon-do in breaks and brings chocolate for our lactose-intolerant teacher.
This morning I walked with our neighbours to class.
"How is the cat?" I said.
"It's okay," said Anneh. "I gave it some sausage and washed it."
"You washed it?" I said.
"Yes, I'd given it sausage and I didn't know what else to do. I thought that's what you did with cats."
"Not so much, I think. You might be thinking of cars, or cutlery. What did it do when you washed it?"
"Oh, it didn't like it. And this morning, there was a terrible smell from under our bath."
"Yes, there's something you might want to know about cats," I said.
After class this morning I stopped to fill in our kommandant, Natalya Viktorovna, about the cat situation. She asked me to describe the cat.
"It's small and makes a mewing sound," I said. "Looks a bit like Yuri Andropov."
"Oh," she said. "That's not the one I've lost."
This will sound petulant, but sometimes I think people in this building deserve their cats to be washed.

Sunday morning in the garden of nerpa

2006-03-21T18:01:00.000+08:00

Sunday was the last day of the hockey season, or to be literal in translation of these things, the hockey-with-a-ball season (catchy, no?). Essentially, we're talking football in terms of game time, pitch size and number of players; hockey in all other respects; and my very favourite part, a giant nerpa mascot that reminds me of the characters they used to have on Weetabix boxes in England.
We'd been to a game earlier in the season, when the games were at night in bone bursting temperatures, and you sat, getting by necessity drunker, on whatever insulation you had remembered to bring with you (us: plastic bag, copy of Irkutsk Zhizn - "Satan captured on video in Irkutsk church!") on top of compacted snow.
By Sunday, we were saddened to learn that Baikal Energiya's winning ways had deserted them, although the sexually suggestive dances of the nerpa remained inventive. They played at 11am, a return leg playoff for seventh place against Vodnik Arkhangelsk (just the five time zones away north of St Petersburg). They'd lost the away leg 9-7.
By the time we arrived, 10 minutes before puck-off (is there a term for that in hockey?), the three men behind us had reached that level of inebriation where you loudly answer stadium announcements, your two mates laugh and everybody else notices your three-quarters-empty bottle of cognac. The match began. Baikal fell two goals behind, forgetting to defend, which - forgiveable, I thought, as one of the men sitting behind us had forgotten to stay awake. We joined in the crowd chants, which are perfect for foreigners because they are repetitive and no one minds your pronunciation. The commonest in hockey-with-a-ball are 'nada nada nada, gol gol gol' ('we need a goal'), 'shaibo' (puck), and molotsi (plural of 'molodyets', which my dictionary says is 'fine fellow', and which for me is proof you should never use dictionaries to translate.) We shouted 'nada, gol' for a bit, because we really needed a goal, but then there were goals and things settled.
At half time we bought some of the cheapest vodka I have had the mispleasure to drink before noon. After the break we shouted 'shaibo', really wanting to encourage the puck (okay, ball) and thank it for its part in the season. Then, in the very last minute, Baikal scored twice, won 7-5 and on aggregate because of the away-goals rule, and we shouted 'molotsi' until we were hoarse and the blood had begun to recirculate in our limbs.
As we walked from the stadium to the market, the man beside us was on the phone shouting, "We got seventh!" Another man with golden eye teeth pumped our hands and congratulated us on the end of the season. It was the happiest I have seen anyone in Irkutsk in public.

out behind the bus station, Irkutsk

2006-03-18T12:16:00.000+08:00

ChebooRASHka (n. strange tumbling thing)

2006-03-14T20:31:00.000+08:00

It's not often that K and the Russian Winter Olympic team are as one, other than, obviously, their ability to ski many miles through the forest, stop, shoot at things, then ski on. The eagle-eyed among you will have noticed among the hooting of Russian lugists and figure skaters last month, the Russian team mascot, here:
K received her version from an anonymous well-wisher for one of the two women-centred festivals of the last few weeks (day of all lovers - Feb 14; International Women's Day - Mar 8). It's brown and, when you push on its belly, emits a scratchy, quasi-musical shrieking that I personally find delightful.
Cheburashka, as it turns out, is a cartoon character with whom pretty much all Russian kids grew up. He's of no fixed species, his best friend is a crocodile, and his nemesis is a wicked old woman in a frock coat. Except for the woman, he's essentially Steve Irwin.
As Cheburashka speaks in a sing-song, simplified Russian, which is much, much easier than trying to work out what real people are saying, and also sings, which we like, K and I have been getting acquainted with him. He's cheery, fond of a venture and - tropical, having (much like ourselves) found himself in Russia after falling asleep in a crate of oranges. So you can see why they thought he was perfect for Torino.

Find out more! (third link on the left is for pictures, sixth on the left for music)

Olkhon

2006-03-11T13:57:00.000+08:00

nyemtsi

2006-03-11T12:53:00.000+08:00

Siberia as a rule gets a pitiful trickle of tourists. The figures I heard recently were three million per year for the whole of Russia (heaven knows what puts the others off - it's not like there's a byzantine visa process, tight government control or regular racist attacks. Oh, wait). Of these, 90 per cent don't leave Moscow and St Petersburg, and 90 per cent of the remainder don't cross the Urals. If my maths are right, this leaves Siberia with fewer tourists per year than you could fit, with sufficient prodding, in an Olympic-sized swimming pool. And, if highly unscientific observations are anything to go by (and I think we all agree they are), all but eight of these people are German.
Why this should be the case, I'm not entirely sure. The old Russian word for foreigner is 'NYEmets', originally meaning 'mute', which I like ("they're not talking in a language at all - just babble. Why don't they use words?"), but which has since come to specifically mean 'German', which might be some indication of the proportion of foreigners that Germans here make up. Baikal has always been popular with the Nyemtsi, and Olkhon island became a hot spot a few years back when the top German TV station filmed a reality show in Khuzhir. A family got to live in a log cottage sans electricity or running water 'kak Sibiryachki', as they say - like Siberians, although unlike Siberians, German TV viewers weren't allowed to see the satellite on the roof of the house across the street, the internet access therein and the fortress-like tourist complex spreading a hundred metres away on the crest of a hill.

The last time K and I visited Olkhon, you'll remember that we crossed the water in a floating, diesel-powered contraption and that we stayed in a pleasant, near-empty hotel run by Tanya, a woman who may or may not have been sleeping with our bus driver. This time, with some German friends (yes, Germany. It's just next to Poland), we crossed the water, which at some time during the winter had hardened and lost its wetness, in a weary old Lada, and we stayed in the Nikita homestead, above-mentioned fortress where a friend of ours was working.
At Nikita's, which, I will say, was efficient and welcoming, there was a frenzy of construction, expanding the dining hall/ping-pong room/three banyas/endless guesthouses arrangement in time for the summer rush. Out the back, they were building a pool. Inside the dining hall were a handful of holidaying Russians, the local Orthodox priest, the local militsia, some labourers from Central Asia and 30 school students from eastern Germany. We listened to their wordless babble and then chatted in English about Rammstein.
On the Friday the school group left and we went for a walk on Baikal. How nice it will be to have some quiet tonight, we thought, listening to the air bubbles bursting beneath us against the ice.
That evening a four-wheel drive pulled up outside Nikita's. During dinner three more arrived, then six and then eight. Men arrived and began nailing posters to the outside of the dining hall. Flags went up near the entrance. TV crews starting setting up beneath them. By the time we'd finished our omul, played travel scrabble (remember: magnet-side down), drunk coffee, almost expired in a banya and recovered with a strange hibiscus tea, a 120-man car rally had pulled in on its way from Murmansk to Vladivostok. They must have seen the light on.
In the morning, 40 teams of hugely wealthy racers (entry fees just the $80,000; grand rally prize: 10 kg of gold) swung their hugely expensive four-wheel drives in doughnuts around the ice. I walked around trying not to receive hugely painful injuries. The cars, they were loud.
To celebrate some prazdnik or other (beginning of Lent, perhaps? There were pancakes in Irkutsk and lots of people burning effigies. Is Lent usually effigies?), organisers had set up a row of gas-fuelled barbecue grills on the ice. In alarming syncronicity with my own vow for Lent this year, which is to give up eating things longer than the width of a swimming pool, when they were done driving their cars around they cooked a 25-metre sausage. On seeing how many hands went into its making, I left the sampling to the bevehicled rich. Walking back across the ice I got chatting to a chap. It turned out he was from Munich.

Ulan Ude

2006-03-10T14:41:00.000+08:00

3 lies about the Siberian winter

2006-03-10T10:19:00.000+08:00

Lie #1: minus 30 is the same as -5
I remember more than a few conversations with seasoned winter folk (hello, Canadians) about Siberia and its relative liveability. "Of course," they'd say, tipping their touk to a knowing angle, "once you're a few degrees below zero most temperatures are alike. Whether it's -5 or -35, you're looking at the same level of discomfort. So long as you have decent clothes you'll be fine." Rubbish, Canadians. In -5 you can get by without gloves. In -15 you need gloves and a fat coat, but your beard doesn't freeze. In -20 you might on occasion skewer your loved one with the icicles hanging from your nostrils, but your face won't hurt. In -30 you'll have the hurting, the dangling and a flattering tightening of the skin I believe I've previously described, but at least you'll be able to spend more than a few minutes away from your Ulan Ude hotel, which you checked into at the beginning of the world's most ill-fated holiday, on the day the temperature hit -42, without your lungs constricting, eyes burning, and nipples - I swear - turning inwards. Lie!

Lie #2: your breath freezes and drops to the ground
Swirls around your head making photography difficult, yes. Freezes and tinkles prettily to the ground, not so much, even in Ulan Ude, where the involuntary streaming from your eye ducts obscures the world's largest Lenin head.
(I read recently that the freezing and the dropping does in fact occur in the Siberian Arctic - and, presumably, other bits of the Arctic - making a sound sweetly referred to as the whispering of stars, but only where the temperature drops to -60 and below. But then for all I know there's a reader in the Arctic watching his breath float off in the distance and tipping his touk to a knowing angle. Probably also searching for his nipples.)
Lie!

Lie #3: no getting sick
This is the great thing about a proper winter, they said, their touks getting so low as to muffle the sound. Germs don't survive. How could they? It's -30. Those little green fellers would never get by without scarves.
The morning of day three of the world's most ill-fated holiday, with the mercury at -32 and a bitter wind whipping in from the Selenga, we set off on our brittle limbs, dashing around Ulan Ude from hotel to nature museum, nature museum to fast food restaurant Happy Land, Happy Land to the cinema, where we saw the Russian film Svolochi, about war (I know! Imagine!). Towards lunchtime we found a number of things shutting down, including our sinuses and the puppet show, on account of conditions so extreme that the schools had closed. The afternoon we spent coughing up green.
Then, on limping weakly back to Irkutsk, writing off the holiday as a folly on par with a four-storey head of a man who despised personality cults, we found everyone else stricken with gripp (flu), all the ads on telly for gripp remedies and cough syrups and good-bacteria yoghurts, and ourselves with a head cold that took more than a fortnight to shake. They lied. Damn them.

smoke us a kipper

2006-01-31T17:08:00.000+08:00

Winter hols, so no updates for a fortnight or so. We're heading for Ulan Ude, home of the world's biggest Lenin head and, hopefully, the world's biggest Lenin head t-shirt. Then we'll tootle up and down a little according to the goodwill of the weather gods and the marshrootky men. Wouldn't it be cool if they turned out to be the same? "No fare? Ha! Here's a hailstorm!"

torosy and grey

2006-01-31T16:49:00.000+08:00

Bolshoye Goloustnoye

2006-01-31T16:38:00.000+08:00

lyOT (n. ice)

2006-01-31T16:28:00.000+08:00

toROsy (n. pack ice)

2006-01-31T16:20:00.000+08:00

Baikal's finally frozen. I'd always expected a process - perhaps slush for a week or two, a crust around the shoreline, your occasional floe. Not how things work, apparently. The weekend before last there was no ice. By Tuesday or Wednesday - ice, locked over the whole lake like a lid on a saucepan.
We'd booked tickets on the 5pm to Bolshoye Goloustnoye, not nearly as neat a transaction as it sounds.
"Family name?" said the bus driver.
"Price."
"And who will you be seeing in Bolshoye Goloustnoye, Price?"
"Marina."
"Who?"
"Buryat lady. Glasses."
"Ah, Marina. Third stop, by the school. When will you be returning, Price?"
"Sunday afternoon."
"Okay. Sign here for your tickets. Oh, wait. Which seats do you want?"
"Seats? I don't know. These at the front."
"What? No, you don't want those. Too close to the fridge."
"Okay, these ones across the aisle."
"No good either. Right behind the driver. Can't see a thing. What about these, one row back?"
"Fine."
"Okay. Sign for your tickets, please."
"There's a fridge?"
"You weren't told about the fridge?"
The good Marina met us in Bolshoye Goloustnoye, a village of log cottages spread out 80km north of Irkutsk behind the mouth of the river (you'll never pick this) Goloustnoye. In winter the village is majority Buryat. In summer the Russians pour in to make use of their dachas. Marina installed us in her family's second home, with a wood-burning stove, a cellar filled with potatos and cabbages, a cat named Pookha and a second bedroom converted into a fridge by the traditional native Siberian technique of opening the windows.
We slept with the wallpaper spitting and bursting around us. ("Happens every year," said Marina's sister, Turyana. "Perhaps next time, we'll paint.")
In the morning we walked out onto Baikal. The ice was already six inches thick, but cracking and booming like a deep and distant gong. Where the snow had blown clear you could see the moss on the stones on the lake bed. There were air bubbles frozen white, trees caught half in, half out of the water. Once, as K walked, the ice split a half inch in front of her. Near the glassy mouth of the river, two ice shelves had crashed into each other and piled into torosy.
While we thawed at lunchtime Marina filled us with solyanka, salads and lamb shanks. In the afternoon the temperature dropped towards 30, in which - unless you're Russian - you have only an hour or so to walk anything off, then there was steamed fish and mashed potatoes for dinner. With sausages, eggs, bliny and rice kasha next morning, and soup, cutlets and salad for lunch we were, basically, nerpas.
"Which seats do you have?" said Marina, as we left. Five and six, we said, gesturing with our flippers. "You've done well there," said Marina, hustling us onto the bus. "Two of the best."

VAlenky (n. boots made of thick felt)

2006-01-30T14:34:00.000+08:00

The babushki know their stuff. There we were, running round half the winter with cold toes and bewilderment and all the time the answer was padding along beneath a knee-hugging cardigan and a 'Samson & Stone' shopping bag.
So it was that on the weekend, with the temperature predicted to drop into the 40s, we went to the central market to buy valenky.
"They're too big," said K.
"Oh no, they'll shrink," said the valenky lady, a middle-aged Buryat with a sideline in shopping bags ('the co-op; your friendly grocer').
"Really?" said K.
"Oh yes. Walk around in the snow for a couple of days, you'll see. Besides, you want them to be a little oversized. You need an air cushion. It's the bubbles of nothing that make valenky really something."
"Are the grey ones warmer?" we said, having researched valenky pretty thoroughly and heard that the grey ones were warmer.
"Oh, you don't want the grey ones now," said the valenky seller. "It's late in the season and they've gone all pointy on the bottom."
We looked and it was true. The grey ones had gone all pointy on the bottom. We've since also learned that ideally you should keep your valenky inside, next to the stove, assuming you have a stove, and not a shared kitchen filled with Russian teenagers smoking and listening to the Fred Durst song that begins "nobody knows what it's like to be the bad guy" (except other bad guys, right, Fred?). We've found that valenky do indeed shrink after a couple of days in the snow, although after the shrinking is done, it's best to brush the snow from your valenky with a straw broom. And on the weekend we learned that you may find your valenky are too tall, preventing you for example, from squatting over an outside toilet without sticking one of your feet out in the manner of a cossack - and in this case you can simply carve a couple of inches from the top of your valenky with a good knife.

K's are her own. I borrowed mine from a friend, who bought them early in valenky season, before they could go all pointy on the bottom. Behold!

some appendages from Russian history

2006-01-27T13:10:00.000+08:00

the damned (Svyatopolk, 1015-19)
of the large nest (Vsevelod, 1176-1212)
the proud (Simeon, 1341-53)
the meek (Ivan, 1353-59)
the blind (Vasily, 1425-62)
the squint-eyed (Vasily)
the quietest one (Alexis, 1645-76)

and my favourite, although not really an appendage:

False Dmitrii (1605)

who my Russian history book describes as follows:

"no waistline, red hair that habitually stood up, a large wart on his face, a big ugly nose, arms of unequal length, and an expression both unsympathetic and melancholy."

I imagine 'the gimpy' was taken.

kreshchENyeh (n. baptism)

2006-01-20T12:52:00.000+08:00

Yesterday was the anniversary of the baptism of Christ (God's own calendar). No doubt you celebrated in your own way. Here in Irkutsk folk celebrated by driving to Baikal and hurling themselves into the icy waters, emerging blue and gasping in a manner rich with spiritual symbolism. Unhappily we were exam-bound in Irkutsk and no one was jumping in the Angara as apparently even the anniversary of Christ's anointing does not warrant liver poisoning.
Late in the afternoon I did pay a visit to the Cathedral of the Apparition of Our Lord, not far from the memorial to the victims of the war against fascism. Figuring that when in Rome you stick close to the Romans and try not to do anything offensive, I doffed my beanie, stamped the snow from my boots and joined a crowd around what turned out to be three giant cauldrons. Priests in white lab coats were ladling out water into the receptacles of the faithful: water bottles, flasks, a jerry can. Presumably, the water was sanctified. Certainly it was cloudy. How cloudy, or how holy, or whether water blessed by the priests of the Cathedral of the Apparition of Our Lord is in fact ammonia, I can't say, as I'd come straight from university and left my hip flask at home.
The crowd kept moving in an incense haze, people coming and going and everyone inside the cathedral moving from one place to another: lighting candles, crossing themselves, filling their water flasks. In an alcove at the back of the cathedral around the leathery relics of a long-dead saint, a group of women - perhaps nuns - were singing in that off-key harmony that is at the same time beautiful and chilling. Near the entranceway the beggars and icon sellers were doing a roaring trade.

maROZnye (a. frosty)

2006-01-16T22:38:00.000+08:00

death of an arse sled (came as no surprise)

2006-01-16T19:48:00.000+08:00

On Saturday we visited our Alaskan friend in the infectious diseases hospital. It was a cheery outpost on the north-eastern edge of town next to a chemicals factory, giving new irony to the phrase 'take the air'. Joe's hospital window overlooked three enormous smokestacks belching smog. When we made our farewells, leaving Joe in the care of his mostly jaundiced neighbours, we found the temperature outside had fallen. There had been talk of a low from Novosibirsk, but as Siberians usually make things up when it comes to the weather (as in September, when for a month the snows were due tomorrow) we hadn't paid attention.
Now, we waited for a marshrootka helpless in the teeth of a bitter north wind. My beard froze. Our hands began to burn. Breathing became difficult, at least with these lungs, and you could no longer see your breath. (Odd, this last one. The way I see it, this could be the wind or weird science. I'm rooting for weird science but will keep you posted). As our feet thawed in the marshrootka K and I resolved to buy valenki - calf-high boots made entirely of felt which are completely impractical in the wet but good for 5-6 months a year in Siberia.
We walked home from the bus stop along the perilous ice strip that near our student hostel passes for a footpath. A steam cloud had engulfed the Angara and may or may not have been cause or effect of a small Irkutsk housing district losing hot water that afternoon (which isn't as bad as it sounds, except for the unavailablity of all other methods of heating and the possibility of dying. Wait, that is as bad as it sounds.) Extremities already numb, my eyes began to water, and the water froze on my cheekbones. By the hostel door my skin had tightened and all I could manage was a pained and involuntary smile - exactly like botox, I imagine. On the plus side, my crows' feet were gone.
Towards midnight that evening the top-right corner of the television showed 38 below (the local channels here display the temperature at all times - I think to mock us, the viewers. It's as if they're saying, "Sure, we're showing cheap Austrian rescue dramas - but check the temperature. Do you really think you're going outside in this?"). In the spirit of scientific enquiry (see? we suffer for humanity's gain) we hoisted arse sleds and went outside.
Outside the fog was rolling in off the Angara, and it was nippy. Don't forget your woollens when it's minus 38, that's my advice. Of more interest was that after 20 minutes or so outdoors, my arse sled petrified and its beautifully contoured flexiplastic base shattered. It shall be mourned. And replaced.

kley (n. glue)

2006-01-13T10:48:00.000+08:00

When K and I first moved in to our two-room, fourth-floor, tastefully pastel student hostel home, I remember the conversation we had about decorations. How, we wondered, should we put up our posters, longyis, giant boxing kangaroo flags and so forth without damaging the walls? In the end we settled for a combination of tacks and carefully double-backed sticky-tape.
A few days before false Christmas, when the temperature dropped, we realised our windows weren't going to do us through winter. We have a double layer of windows through which icy air seeps at the best of times, and at 30 below they were letting in a gale which rendered half our living quarters an unfestive tundra.
As we do at these times, we paid a visit to our hostel kommandant, the good and gold-toothed Elena Viktorovna. We waited until Elena Viktorovna explained to a Russian girl why she couldn't share a room with fewer than three people, then we explained about the windows.
"Have you glued newspaper on them?" said Elena Viktorovna.
We looked stupid and foreign.
"Newspaper," said Elena Viktorovna. "Cut it into strips and glue it over the cracks in your window frames. It's all you'll need. I promise."
"Would sticky tape be okay?" we said, not yet having mastered the word for glue.
Elena Viktorovna deliberated. "Sticky tape should work," she said. "But glue would be better."
K and I demurred for a fortnight, partly because we were distracted by festivities and calendrical quibbles, partly because we needed the TV guide (2.15pm, weekdays, RenTV: Secret Materials (the X-Files)).
But this week the time arrived. We worked through a roll of sticky tape, Wednesday's copy of Irkutsk Zhizn ('Pugacheva is dead to me: (Russian theatre patriarch Josef) Kobzon'; 'Gorbachev's daughter to marry mystery man') and behold! The permafrost has retreated from our windowsill. Also, we're no longer so concerned about putting up posters.

fight for your right to party (in 14 days, as God intended)

2006-01-12T22:40:00.000+08:00

on the eve of true New Year's, Rodina (Motherland), a political party normally devoted to such causes as thinly-disguised racism, has come out swinging for the Julian Calendar.
I particularly enjoyed the news that 80-odd years ago in Constantinople they came up with a second 'fixed' Julian calendar (the cheaters' calendar, I like to think of it), and in trying to impose it nearly caused riots.
Can sense get through the Duma?

paDARki (pl n. presents)

2006-01-12T22:27:00.000+08:00

For Christmas Ded Moroz (whose blue-robed Snow Maiden, Snegurochka, is grandaughter, not wife - sorry to anyone whose trivia evenings I ruined) brought me...

...which is wonderful. I don't care that even the good vodka tastes like burning. I don't care that life expectancy here is in the 50s, due partly, no doubt, to the prevalence of same. When the mercury's at the wrong kind of 30 and we want to go ice skating, I want my hip flask, and I want it filled to the brim with the potato plant's finest.

And...

...which I thought at first was fake breasts, but it turns out is an arse sled.
As you might expect in Siberia in January, there is an uncommon volume of snow on the ground, and obviously this invites sliding. However, without the resources or the long-term commitment to invest in a toboggan, you're left with a trip into town for a five-metre ice slide that, although fun, comes with the possibility of long-term tissue damage from your Korean neighbour landing behind you and sticking his knee into your head. No longer! With my arse sled, which I love like a firstborn, I need no more than a bank or an incline and happiness is mine.

It terrifies me to think I lived without these two things.

c novym godom (happy new year)

2006-01-05T13:49:00.000+08:00

a beary Christmas (oh, come on. Got a better bear pun?)

2006-01-05T13:46:00.000+08:00

around town

2006-01-05T13:41:00.000+08:00

bus window

2006-01-05T13:38:00.000+08:00

Baikal 6, Krasnoyarsk 1

2006-01-05T13:28:00.000+08:00

Happy (false) Christmas!

2005-12-23T18:09:00.000+08:00

Say what you will about Pope Gregory XVIII, the man knew how to mess up the holidays. There we were some time in the 16th century with a perfectly functional calendar losing at most, 11 or 12 minutes a year - and he had to go and build a new one that works.
Happily here they've hung on to their senses and the old calendar. It's drifted just the fortnight since the time of Christ, which I can't see makes all that much of a difference to anyone's shopping schedule.
The upshot is we have three Christmases this year. Ours, naturally; then Russian Christmas as God and Caesar intended it on January 7, plus, one day before ours, German Christmas. I don't know what's going on with the Germans.
No Santa Claus in Irkutsk either, or only a bit, in the worst of the shopfronts. Instead we have Ded Moroz (Grandfather Frost), who comes, rings in the season then fights with Batman; his wife Snegurochka (Snow Maiden), and their tiny dog - all of whom figure in ice statues on Kirov Square.
There's a metre of snow on the ground despite some unseasonal warmth, mull wine on the stove, and the icicles hanging from our window are something to behold.
Happy Christmas, Gregorians! Sit tight, Julians!

(Sadly, the Russians have given ground on New Year, which I was disappointed to learn is celebrated according to Gregory's calendar and only by a few true believers on its proper date of January 14. I keep telling people this kind of thing is only the beginning. Before you know it there'll be leap years.)

it all makes work for the working man to do

2005-12-21T11:07:00.000+08:00

There are some Russian institutions I won't hear a word against. If I had a parcel of great importance and a month or two up my sleeve, I would gladly entrust it to Russia Post. Almost always the public transport here is regular, cheap and reliable, and its employees are saints among men, except for the ticket-sellers, who are bastards. The ice cream and chocolate industries are testament to centuries of human and bovine toil. Then there are Russian workmen. I give you:

Friday...
On Friday our taps stopped working, as they do from time to time. We mentioned this to our kommandant (hostel supervisor), who sent in a man with a spanner and a look of weariness. He took off the taps and held a saucepan over the spout.
"This will catch the spray," he said, wrongly. Black water spattered into our walls.
For some time he played with the taps, taking them apart, putting them back together, trying the water. The wall grew blacker. Eventually, as he stabbed with a screwdriver at the inside of the taps, a hunk of lead solder shot out and splintered in our bath.
"This must have happened when they replaced your pipes," he said. "I imagine they had the taps off and dropped a lump of lead down the spout. Shoddy workmanship, really."
That afternoon K and I went out and bought a water filter and a book called 'Living with Leukemia'. When we returned and tried the taps at the sink, water started coming out of the shower.

...Monday...
-28 overnight, and the wind came whistling through our windowframes. I dropped in to see the kommandant.
"None of our windows close properly," I said.
"Have you tried gluing paper over all the cracks?" she said.
"Well, no," I said, thinking back to the naivety with which K and I once discussed whether it was okay to put pictures up with sticky tape.
"Try that," she said. "But in the meantime I'll send in a man."
The man arrived clutching a hammer. He went straight to the windows.
"Ah yes. When they renovated in the summer they painted over the locks and latches," he said. "Poor, really."
For a few minutes he smashed away at our painted-shut bolts. The rattle of the windows sounded like someone wailing 'You'll sleep behind cardboard! Behind cardboard!' It was really strange. But the glass held, and the man freed, or almost freed, all of our bolts so that although they now don't work in a strictly practical sense, they're not technically stuck.
"Anything else?" he said.
"When we turn the sink taps on water comes out of our shower head." I said.
"Sorry, I don't do taps," he said. "Taps are someone else."
"So you... just do banging?"
"Yep," he said, replacing his hammer in a toolbox that I noticed contained several more hammers. "Just banging."

...and Tuesday
on Tuesday some men came with buckets of sand and grit.
"Hello, men," we said.
"We'll be needing the bathroom," said the men.
We went to class, and while we were out the men filled in the hole in our ceiling that other men made two months ago. So our ceiling's fixed. At least, most of it. They haven't yet plastered over the spot where the hole was, so there is still peeling paint and plaster from a previous job ("don't know what that last lot were doing," said the new men. "Shoddy, really."), and the floor of our bathroom is once again caked in plasterdust and silt.
"Will you also be painting the hot-water pipes?" said K. "The ones that rusted outside before they were installed so that now, every time we brush against them we collect burnt orange streaks across our clothing?"
"Oh no," said the men. "We don't do painting. Painting is someone else."

chuDOvishy (n. monster)

2005-12-18T08:35:00.000+08:00

Tanya, the girl-limpet who has drifted from our English friend Steve onto K and I, invited us this week to a railway jaunt around Baikal. We agreed, as: 1. we like Baikal, and 2. a jaunt lessens the chance that Tanya will spend the weekend stinking out our bedroom. I don’t care how ungracious this sounds: the girl needs anti-perspirant.
We met on a street corner on the city side of the Angara, which incidentally is all out of whack just now. It doesn’t usually freeze, apparently, although there’s already a crust of ice around its banks. But for weeks now it’s been sliding blackly out of Baikal beneath strange and slightly cheesy wisps of steam. Is it a river or a David Copperfield set? The Angara will let you know.
We dawdled for an hour near the bridge in sub-Arctic temperatures. A dozen Russians joined us, then a woman who got her fur coat caught in a departing marshrootky (fixed-route minibus: a bus, for all intents and purposes, but, well, mini). She bumped along for a few metres without breaking a heel. Lesson: if you’re looking for sturdy stilettos, you could do worse than Irkutsk.
Eventually somebody arrived clutching a loudspeaker. We were called ‘respected passengers’, then herded into a bus and off down the highway to Listvyanka. The Irkutsk-Listvyanka road is one of the best in the country and in a neat coincidence serves dozens of government dachas.
At Listvyanka we piled onto a ferry named Babushkin. Baikal won’t freeze until January but it is already covered with pads of ice and at the rivermouth the Angara’s mist has piled into banks of freezing fog.
A pair of elderly sisters were along for the ride.
“Throw kopeks in the water,” they said. “It will bring you good luck and wealth.”
“Won’t that actually make me less wealthy?” I said, quickly doing the maths. They were having none of it.
Across the rivermouth we left the Babushkin for the round-Baikal train – a single carriage that runs on a single line through century-old tunnels and embankments blasted out of the cliff face. It runs from Port Baikal to Slyudanka (railway station picture below), on Baikal’s southern shore, then inland back to Irkutsk.
The old ladies were up for a chat. So too was a Buryat lady who teaches English in primary schools around the region and whose 10-year-old's birthday necessitated the singing of not one but two birthday songs. Half Baikal's tunnels were behind us before I found myself chatting to Tanya.
“Is there a monster in Baikal?” I said. I like monsters, especially sea monsters, and have always found it unlikely that there's no monster in Baikal - a lake so deep it has spineless tadpole creatures with transluscent skin and headlamp eyes. Recently I was excited to learn the Russian word for monster, which saves me introducing the topic by saying ‘enormous fantasy animal’.
“Oh yes,” said Tanya. "Of course there's a monster."
“What kind of monster?”
“It’s a mighty serpent.”
“Does it eat people?” I said.
“No,” said Tanya. “But it swims around a lot”
“Does it have a name?” I said.
“Not really,” said Tanya. “Perhaps ‘Serpent’”
After this conversation, I asked several others on the train about the Baikal serpent. No one had heard of it. Not the sisters, not the Buryat lady, Maria, not the charming tour leader Marina, and neither has anyone I've spoken to since.
While pondering this, I remembered an incident from a few weeks ago when a bus exploded in front of our university building. Coming home from classes we saw ambulances and a pair of fire engines swarming around the blackened husk.
We were having a cup of tea with Steve when Tanya popped in that evening. As you do when a bus has exploded, we raised the topic.
“Ah yes,” she said. “It wasn’t a big deal. Nobody was hurt. The driver actually drove the bus away.”
“Really?” we said.
“Oh yes,” said Tanya.
"What about the ambulances?"
"Oh, there weren't any ambulances," said Tanya. "Everything was fine." And nothing would shake her. Not witness accounts, not arguments over the likelihood of the driver of a charred skeleton bus still finding first gear and a petrol tank. I am concerned about the implications of this for my serpent.

some news this week

2005-12-14T23:51:00.000+08:00

in Kirov Square, the town centrepiece that is huge, purposeless and not a square (Kirov Horseshoe, anyone?), they're building things out of ice. There's a kind of fort, a gate and what appears to be a giant slide. It's not yet finished and already it's three metres high. I may not know much about ice sculpture, but I know what I like.

there's snow on almost everything, including my beard, our thermometer, the market camel and the statues. Lenin's little snow cap makes him look like the Pope.

our Russian teacher, who turned 60 in September, has confided she owns a nine-kilogram cat. It's named Dodi, after al-Fayed.

we're being ever-so-slightly stalked by a Russian girl who was ever-so-slightly stalking our English friend. He has flown heartlessly home for the holidays, leaving us a tub of margarine, a television and a nightly visit from Tanya who chats to me, chats to K, then just freaking lingers.

Kazakhstan has shut down Borat's site. Which can't possibly backfire - can it?

studgorodok

2005-12-13T14:02:00.000+08:00

krugobaikal

2005-12-13T14:00:00.000+08:00

prazdnik

2005-12-13T13:54:00.000+08:00

get your pomegranates

2005-12-09T15:04:00.000+08:00

Some weeks ago we asked our friend Rita about the outdoor fruit and veg market in town.
"Will it still be there when the weather turns?" we said.
"Of course," said Rita, as if the thought of -30 temperatures forcing people indoors would occur only to our sweet and foreign minds. "It's there right through the winter."
As it turns out, we didn't ask quite the right question.
The right question would have been, "Will there be frozen fish and cartons and cartons of tomatoes and pomegranates, each more blistered and putrid than the last?"

yakshymash

2005-12-09T00:16:00.000+08:00

There have been elections in Kazakhstan this week, contentious* on account of the usual vote-fiddling and corruption, and tense because of the revolutions that have been rattling around Central Asia of late.
Of course, everyone knows that in Kazakhstan the real issue is Borat.

The story goes like this:

Early in November, Sacha Baron Cohen - who is Ali G, Borat, and, if I'm not mistaken, shagging Isla Fisher - hosted the MTV Europe Music Awards as Borat. He arrived in an Air Kazakh plane piloted by a one-eyed man with a vodka bottle. The Kazakh foreign ministry, which likes to know what the kids are into, got wind of this. They weren't happy.
"We do not rule out that Mr. Cohen is serving someone’s political order... to present Kazakhstan and its people in a derogatory way," they said.
"I innocent," said Borat, on his website.
The foreign ministry said they might sue. Tensions dragged on.
Then last week, on the eve of the election, there was an about face from the Kazakh embassy in London. Officials said they now realised Borat was harmless. Not only that, he was doing wonders for tourism.
"More people are applying for visas to Kazakhstan than ever," they said. "Many are intrigued by [Borat] and he’s introduced them to the country."

It seems to me this story isn't over. What will a Borat boom mean for Kazakhstan? What will happen when backpackers begin hitting the grasslands expecting cheap suits and campness? What will the foreign ministry think when the Borat movie comes out, as apparently, it will next year? What will the OSCE have to say about all this?

*Not in my favourite tabloid newspaper Irkutsk Zhizn, where they're more concerned about the car crash that is singer Alla Pugacheva's fourth marriage and how starlet Tatiana Bulanova wants to have the St Petersburg Zenit captain's baby.

PRAZ-dnik (n.) festival, feast

2005-12-05T13:22:00.000+08:00

Yesterday was the start of something, so there was a festival. The festival was in another part of town, near where the Angara is dammed and where there are wooden houses which seem constantly without electricity, or at least lightbulbs. Far enough from our hostel, in any case, for us to be lost for more than an hour in the dark, during which time I learned that beards can freeze. Winter can't be fun for the Orthodox clergy.
The festival itself was 25 folk music enthusiasts and a garmoshka (accordian). There was singing. There was dancing, much of it the kind where you have to not only track what you are doing, but anticipate what other people will be doing. There were a number of casualties. On the two oldest, roundest women in the group, there were costumes. There was an odd little pantomime that involved sitting on each others' laps.
After the dancing the vodka came out and there was singing again. The singing is difficult to describe, except to say that it wasn't what I had expected, which I think on reflection was table-thumping and songs about bears. It was the kind of singing where the component parts seem slightly off-key until they come together, and then when they do they send chills down your spine. This time the Neighbours theme stayed in the bag.

how to hunt bear

2005-12-04T11:36:00.000+08:00

A Lithuanian chap downstairs has just returned from the taiga north of Baikal, where he’s been living for 15 months with Khanti herders and hunters.
Further north, he said, the Khanti have herds big enough to enable them to subsist entirely on their reindeers. The groups he spent time with tended to hunt for their food and for trade.
“How do you catch a bear?” I said.
“First, take your world war two rifle,” he said. “Set out at dusk, when your bear’s going to be settling in for the night. If you can find where he’s sleeping, you’ll be able to get a clean shot in. Course, this isn’t easy.”
“No?”
“No. The bear is clever. He spends a lot of time before he goes to bed disguising his trail. He’ll walk back on his tracks, carve big circles through the snow, make you think he’s off in one direction then scamper over rocks or something else where he won’t leave a footprint.”
“So how do you find him?”
“You look for big circles in the snow. Then look near them.”
“That’s it?”
“Yep. Sometimes you find he’s heard you coming and already slipped off to the mountains. Those can be long nights. Gets cold in the taiga.”

Here, pooh...

this is a low

2005-12-03T10:53:00.000+08:00

A few days ago the air was mild. Balmy, even. In the afternoon, with the sun on our window thermometer, the mercury crept into plus. Global warming, the women on door duty said. It weren't like that when we were young. Then there were rumours from Moscow of a low.
On Thursday, the first day of December, the temperature dropped. A frost sealed everything but the manholes in white. This morning on the thermometer there's empty glass between 0 and minus 26. Here's what happens when you walk to the shop and it's 26 below:

the sweat on your gloves begins to harden
the snow freezes and grinds beneath your feet
the air rakes up the inside of your nose
you become conscious of your sinuses, how unprotected they feel and how near they are to your brain. You reassure yourself that if Russians suffered brain ice, perhaps causing them to mislay their shopping lists or forget where they lived, you'd know. Surely.
as you crunch along between shop and home, you lose feeling in your nose. You wonder if there are nose cosies. Has anyone invented these? Can they be stupider than pointy shoes?
you consider again the possibility of brain ice.

between bird flu and a toxic place

2005-12-02T00:30:00.000+08:00

Seems we made the right call when picking Siberian universities. Third in line was Novosibirsk, which has spent the autumn cleaning up bird flu outbreaks. And anytime now in Khabarovsk, (fourth pick, two days east) 80 miles of poisonous benzene will begin to flow into town. Our second choice was Vladivostok, which so far seems disaster free, but there's time.
There's been quite a kerfuffle in the local press over the Khabarovsk crisis, most notably about the news that it was two days after the blast in one of their factories before the Chinese mentioned a gazillion litres of people-killer being on the way.
It did occur to me that there might be shades of pots and kettles here. If there was footage of Russia's relationship with the enviroment it would feature slide whistles and be presented by Toni Pearen. They trashed the Urals. They scorched the taiga. In Kazakhstan, in the Soviet era, they went close to actually losing a sea (it's true this could be carelessness). And then there's the openness - 'glasnost', in case you're collecting words that only came into vogue in the eighties - with which they went about these things. Even Gorbachev only admitted Chernobyl when the Scandinavians noticed radioactivity scorching their forests and rang to ask what was going on.
Of course, I don't mean to downplay what is happening in Khabarovsk. All the hypocrisy in the world won't sift the benzene out of your tea. I'm just saying.

some heroes from our Soviet-era textbook and the lessons of their lives

2005-11-29T21:48:00.000+08:00

F. Mansurov
Musician, director of the Bolshoi Theatre.

Composed a daily schedule and stuck to it. On top of his day job, learned foreign languages, played sports, wrote stories. Liked to kick off the day with a spot of gymnastics.

"Never say you will do something tomorrow. The best day is today."

N.M. Amosov
World War Two surgeon. Scholar and writer.

Studied at two universities concurrently. A beacon of organisation. Worked 10-12 hours each day, more if called upon.

"One must love work, keep a daily regime, and especially, participate in sport. For the heart to be healthy it must work."

I.P. Inatovy
Doctor of Physics and Mathematics at the Soviet Academy of Science.

Went to all his lectures, revised them at home. Attended lectures in other faculties. Couldn't stand all the wasted thinking time during morning exercises, so seized the opportunity to practice foreign languages. Rehearsed vocab while waiting for the tram. While gazing out the window solved mathematical problems.

"I have no secret: simply make the most of every hour in the day."

M.L. Popovich
Wife of the cosmonaut P.R. Popovich. Pilot, athlete, engineer, scholar, author and film producer.

Loved a daily regimen, which she imposed not just on herself but on her husband and children. Up at 7, housework and breakfast, then morning exercises without fail. Beloved throughout the land.

"Plan your day and there's plenty of time for rest. But rest must be active. I don't understand how people can lie on the couch and do nothing."

updates, pixel heads

2005-11-25T10:57:00.000+08:00

There are a bunch of old but endearingly dainty China pics here, here , here, here and here; pictures of our bathroom, the football, my scarred consumptive lungs; bits of Irkutsk (and also here).
There are trips to Olkhon, not two but three pages of them, Listvyanka (and again) and Ust Orda, plus the ones from this month. Enjoy! Tell your friends!

the best museum in Russia and other pics of record

2005-11-25T08:35:00.000+08:00

update your guidebooks

2005-11-24T22:30:00.000+08:00

This afternoon we paid a visit to the Irkutsk State Tech Mineralogical Museum. Our Chinese neighbour Shun claims this is the best museum in Russia.
"Have you been to the Hermitage?" I asked Shun afterwards.
"Not yet," said Shun.

an evening with the Troll

2005-11-23T23:43:00.000+08:00

For reasons I'd struggle to explain, I've been wanting for weeks to hear the words 'hello, Irkutsk!' - preferably bellowed from a stage. Last night, snow on our boots and our eyes glistening with hope, K and I went to the Megapolis nightclub to see Moomy Troll.
The Megapolis is a couple of stops from our hostel by trolleybus, tucked away in the apartment belt behind a supermarket and a bowling alley. Inside it's a double-storey nightclub with faux Soviet decor - hammers, sickles, stars and speeches - that you would think would work a treat but oddly doesn't.
I didn't know much about the band beforehand, except that I thought they were from Moscow and have seen them after Linkin Park and Metallica in the music kiosks.
Our Scandinavian neighbours, who came along, said in Finland Moomy Troll was a children's cartoon character. He was white, they said, out of shape and confusing at times.
As it happens the Troll's lead singer was all of these things.
"Hello, Irkutsk!" he said, bounding on with what was already a slightly unsteady gait.
"Hello, Troll!" we said, applauding and waving our blue complimentary 'Moomy Troll' flags. It felt good. The woman beside me began shrieking like a smoke alarm.
In looks the Troll singer was Jon Bon Jovi, perhaps a couple of years before Jon Bon started wearing black and being photographed out of the light. In stage manner he was the reverend in Deadwood, all rolling eyes and convulsions. In mental health he was, sadly, Shane McGowan.
We suspected this first when he turned the microphone around just two or three songs in and asked the crowd to carry things along. Shortly afterwards we noticed the music stand, which every now and then he reached to and turned a page.
My favourite moment came during a song about driving, when he took his tambourine (very rock) and held it out in front of him for a steering wheel mime.
A little later he lurched to the front of the stage.
"Hello Irkutsk!" he said again. I began to suspect this was his last surviving sentence, the way the computer in Space Odyssey devolves to singing 'Daisy'. Somebody threw roses. They played 'hello, goodbye' - much tougher in Russian as there are double the syllables. The shrieking went on beside me. It took none of the magic away.

surly (greetings to the new brunette)

2005-11-21T23:24:00.000+08:00

In St Petersburg last year we stayed in a youth hostel (the SP International Youth Hostel, if you're heading that way. Perfect if you like a curfew, gender segregation and time limits on your breakfast). The general feeling among foreigners in residence was that Russia was difficult and the people who lived in it were worse. Russians, the backpacking types said, were not just rude but nasty. As one Australian lad put it: "Have a good day. Oh wait, you can't - you're in Russia."
These sociologists say all this grump is a facade, a necessary form of self-defence.
Now for starters, I'm not really buying this. How to explain the cashiers in train stations? Or the shopkeepers who turn their backs on you? Or hotel receptionists? Or the militsia, or immigration officials for whom, I swear, there is a tenth circle of hell set specially aside (it's one cavernous waiting room, a stack of forms, pens that don't work and a sign on the door that says 'lunch').
But I'm also not buying the starting premise: that out of doors, Russians just aren't all that nice.
It's certainly true that folk here are friendlier indoors than out. I think this is true of anybody, just as it's true that no one nation should bang on about its own tradition of hospitality as much as almost every nation does. In Laos earlier this year we kept hearing their tourism slogan, 'Land of a million smiles.' How nice, we thought. If only they were on the people.
It's true that to an extent here, you grow to expect a kind of coolness. On the minibuses, people don't smile, and when they do, they have silver teeth, which scares you. Folk won't hold the door open. There's rarely a kind word if you, say, fall on your arse in the snow.
But to judge by our experiences so far in Irkutsk, Russians aren't nearly as surly as they're made out to be. We always get help with directions. In chemists babushkas form lines to advise us on home cures (1. lemon; 2. vodka with red pepper in it). It's a rare late-night bus ride without a slightly tipsy Russian man sharing the comedic gold that is his mate's text message. We can't buy our frozen cabbages without being waylaid for a chat.
I'm not saying we're living in Toyland here. But all this talk of grump seems a shame.

did the Khan have a head? and other stories

2005-11-20T21:55:00.000+08:00

I'm reading Mongolian folktales. Here are some of my favourites (abridged):

the seven mice
Once there lived seven brother mice. They lived on a piece of land the size of your palm. One day some snow fell, and while the mice were clearing the snow they found a knob of butter. They gave the butter to the youngest mouse to look after, but he ate it. So the other mice beat him to death.
In great remorse, the mice went to see a Buddhist lama.
"There are seven of us," said the mice.
"You have a big family," said the lama.
"We live on land no bigger than your palm," said the mice.
"It is a fine estate," said the lama.
"It snowed," said the mice.
"A great tragedy," said the lama.
"We found some butter," said the mice.
"You became rich," said the lama.
"Our younger brother ate it," said the mice.
"He is a good storekeeper," said the lama.
"We killed him," said the mice.
"That wasn't nice," said the lama.
Then the mice knew the lama was a fool. And they knew they had done the wrong thing by killing their brother, and they were sorry.

Moral: lamas are stupid.

the wolf, the fox and the hedgehog
Once there lived a wolf, a fox and a hedgehog. One day they found a plum.
"Who among us should be the one to eat it?" they asked.
The wolf was quick to reply.
"The one who gets drunk most easily should have the plum," he said. "I myself taste only a drop before I am drunk."
"I am drunk as soon as I smell a drink," said the fox.
Then the hedeghog said, "As soon as I hear the word 'drink' I am drunk." And he swayed and fell over.
The wolf and the fox agreed that the hedgehog was the winner, and the hedgehog ate the plum.

Moral: hedgehogs are wily.

did the Khan have a head?
Long ago there lived a Khan. He was famed for his strictness. The people trembled before him and feared to look him in the face.
One day the Khan went hunting. He tired and said to his servants, "Bend for me that lotus tree so I may sit and rest on its branches."
The servants did as the Khan commanded, but as they stepped away, their eyes to the ground, the tree sprang up and the Khan fell to the ground. When the servants ran to his aid, they noticed the Khan had died. Also, they saw he had no head.
"Did the tree tear the Khan's head from his shoulders?" the servants asked. "Or could it be that, as we were never permitted to look at his face, the Khan never had a head at all?"
"Let's ask the Khan's chief counsellor," a servant suggested. So off they galloped.
"I don't know, servants," the counsellor said. "I was afraid to raise my eyes to my master. I do know that he had a hat. It had a round ruby on top. But I never saw whether the Khan had a head."
The servants did not know what to do. How could they find out if the Khan had a head?
"I know," said one. "Let us ride and ask the Khan's wife. Surely she would know whether her husband had a head."
"Alas," said the Khan's wife. "I knew my husband very well, but I cannot tell you whether he had a head. I do know that he had a moustache. It pricked me when we kissed. However, because of my husband's greatness I always screwed up my eyes, and so I cannot tell you whether the Khan had a head."
At this the servants gave up. They returned to their homes and the question was never answered. So what do you think? Did the Khan have a head?

Moral: physiology? Not so big on the steppe.

a problem solved

2005-11-19T16:30:00.000+08:00

valuable advice from the internet, courtesy of K's dad, Ron:

"If the snow is light or fresh, I dig my cane through it, and with the
combination of sound and touch I can tell what is there."

Now to get me a cane...

arshan

2005-11-16T15:41:00.000+08:00

Ever wondered how they cured cataracts in Soviet times? We did. That's why we took ourselves off for the weekend to Arshan. It's four hours west up the Tunka valley, which runs under the Sayan mountains and has the Irkut river, which goes east into the Angara.
Arshan means 'spring', as in water (rather than season or what our mattresses here are missing - we're sleeping on boards, an experience which one day I intend to describe at length to the grandkids). It's a spa town at the foot of the mountains, home to two giant sanitoria of the kind party officials used to frequent to take the air, dozens of convalescing babushkas and tepid, eggy water that, wisdom has it, does wonders for your diseases of the eye.
We stayed in a little pensionnat off the main road. It featured a scorpion-shaped stain on the ceiling and electricity that came and went in atmospheric pulses, but was otherwise the best place we've stayed in Siberia.
On the Saturday night we fell in with three other couples from Irkutsk. They were into Moby and yachting, which in normal circumstamces you'd think would put you off. They had a cauldron full of hot red wine ("from Moldova!" they said. "Hooray!" we said) with spices and fruit, and, as it's a Russian tradition of drinking everything until no one can stand and I'm singing the Neighbours theme, they needed help.
Wonderfully, in Russian the word yachting is written exactly as in English but pronounced phonetically. "Oh, yes," they said, "we love to yakht." The men - Maxim and Zhenya and Alexei - yakht quite regularly. Earlier in the year they yakhted back and forth across Baikal in what they said was a freshwater Guinness record but sounds to me like cheating.
In winter they can't yakht so they drive from Olkhon island east across the ice to a promontory on the opposite shore. Once you're 4-5km out, they said, the ice gets clear and you can see a good 20 metres below the surface. It was so much fun chatting we missed Ostrov Iskushenye.
On the Sunday Alexei and Anya took us to some hot springs a further hour into the Tunka. The springs, they were hot. The surroundings - the bleak snowy fields you can see in some of the photos below - not so much. The changing shacks, they were outdoor. Sadly, we didn't have our thermometer, so I can't tell you exactly the margin between towelling yourself, dressing and losing extremities. I can tell you that for an hour Alexei left his car running so the engine wouldn't freeze.

Miss Smilla's feeling for pain

2005-11-16T15:39:00.000+08:00

Since the snow came, then melted, then froze again, it's been a job getting around. Ah, I'm playing things down. It's worse than that.
I can walk uphill, with more than the usual difficulty but well enough. On the flats I totter, skid a bit. When it's downhill I'm not man so much as penguin. There's a waddle, there's a look that says 'I got nothing but flippers'. Twice now there's been a slide. Dignified? Imagine the footage you see of penguins shooting off ice floes. Then imagine a lone penguin, in a parka, clutching a plastic bag and emitting little penguiny gasps as he slides feet first away from the bread shop.
I'm not kidding here. I really have no idea how to walk on ice. This morning I woke up with stiff quadriceps because I spent half of Tuesday evening on a downslope.
I've tried the following theories:

lean forwards
walk slow
walk fast
toes first (this almost cost me a vertebrae)
heels first
feet flat

What keeps me trying rather than, say, pitching tent at the bread shop, is that there's definitely a way. Russians can do it, I've seen them. And they wear silly shoes. I've asked for tips. Nobody can explain. Other people must have had to deal with this. Somebody must have some ideas. Are there books?

nice, heavy, GSOH

2005-11-15T12:51:00.000+08:00

A young Korean lass has moved in downstairs. Yesterday she said what she thought of us. Of Kathy she said, cute. And who would disagree? "I like Matt, too," she said. "He's nice. And heavy." "Heavy?" I said. "Yes", she said. "Heavy."

arshan

2005-11-15T12:41:00.000+08:00

arshan II

2005-11-15T12:40:00.000+08:00