The Wild Wild East...

Irkutsk is, as one of my former editors put it, The Paris of Siberia... It's an oddly accurate description really. Despite the fact that the city itself has almost nothing to offer even the most dedicated and adventurous tourist, it is, in it's own strange and unqiue way, quite an interesting town... I've spent nearly a week here, based out of either Irkutsk itself, or, for three nights, Olkhon Island, which is 350 hundred kilometers north of here and takes somewhere between 6 and 8 hours to reach by bus, depending on how adept the driver is at dodging potholes and cows, both of which can be found in great abundance on the dirt roads of Siberia... The bus trip north was, for the most part, uneventful, though I did manage to make myself a new friend on the way. Karolina, a Polish girl who's travelling exploits make mine, to date, look quite meager, was sitting behind me on the bus. She was the only other English-speaker on the bus at the start of the trip (Not counting a pair of Quebecois who made it fairly clear they were "from Quebec, not Canada" and didn't like Canadian anglophones) and we managed to become decent friends over the course of the trip. Being a linguistics student, Karolina's Russian skills are, to say the least, far superior to my own; we spent the better part of two days bumming around on beaches and hiking the island before she had to return to Irkutsk to catch a train to Mongolia. We're planning on meeting up and getting a group together for some tours in Ulan-Bator once I get there...

(Below: One slighly crazy Polish polyglot on a ferry dock. I would have been lost on Olkhon without Karolina's help translating. My Russian is so poor that it would often send the locals (and Karolina) into fits of laughter whenever I tried to order a drink, let alone a meal involving more than one type of food.)

Olkhon Island was fascinating in it's own way. Most of my time was spent in the village of Khuzir, located about halfway up the western side of the island. The town is at once extremely primitive and quite advanced (by Siberian standards); electricity was only brought in in 2005, and running water is still, if you'll pardon the pun, a pipe-dream. The room I stayed in was a small three-bedroom (though I had the place to myself) on the very edge of town. A quick step out my door and I was looking at a radio tower, then nothing but barren hills and sparse pine forrest as far as I could see. The toilet was a not-so-deep pit in the ground, with a wooden board and a hole cut in it. Cows roam freely through the streets (The farmers here haven't yet found any good reason to put them behind fences, and for the most part they do quite a good job of eating weeds and anything else left on the dirt roads of the town.) On my second day in town I opened my laptop to download some pictures and was pleased to find that, for the first time since leaving Moscow, I had a wifi connection to the internet, courtesy of one of the nearby houses...

(Below: A typical, though somewhat isolated, Olkhon outhouse.)

(Below: A view of the bluffs near Khuzir, as seen from Shaman's Rock.)

Olkhon Island itself, outside of Khuzir that is, is truly one of the most beautiful places I've seen in a very long time. I'd even go so far as to say that Siberia (the parts away from cities at least) rivals B.C. for natural beuaty... Long white-sand beaches, open plains, forrests, and even small mountains (or large hills, depending on who you ask) cover the place. There are also many, many cows.

(Below: Here a cow, there a cow... Note the tents and beach in the background. It's not uncommon to wake up on Olkhon with a cow in one's front yard.)

(Below: Enjoying a sunset from the Khuzir Bluffs, is one of the more popular evening activities on Olkhon Island...)

Since returning from the island my time in Irkutsk has been largely spent exploring out-of-the-way places, including several streets full of old wooden houses (quite a rarity in Russia), most of which were built by, or for, exiled Decemberists in the early/mid-1800's. (I forgot to put pictures of the houses on my USB Drive before leaving my hostel this morning, but will post a few pictures once I get to Mongolia...) I'm currently killing time (This blog is good for something, right?) before hopping on a train to Mongolia...

(Note: This post is titled with apologies to Karolina for stealing "Wild Wild East" from her.)

4 days, 5000km, 7 new friends, no showers... That's one long train trip...

Seeing as how there's been a distinct lack of pictures lately, I'll start this post by throwing up a few shots from St. Petersburg and Moscow... I've talked about both in previous posts, but words really don't do the places justice...

(Below: One of the more historically interesting (to me) places that I visited in Moscow, the Lubyanka, former KGB headquarters. There's an old Russian joke that says the Lubyanka is the tallest building in all of Moscow because you can see Siberia from the basement... It's funny now, but perhaps not so much 30 years ago...)

(Below: A view looking up a canal at Peterhof Palace, just outside of St. Petersburg. The place was created largely by Peter the Great and is really a collection of palaces, gardens, fountains, forrests, and pretty much anything else you can imagine.)
Since departing St. Petersburg I've managed to successfully get myself back to Moscow, and all the way from Moscow to Irkutsk in one very smelly, tired, jetlagged, happy piece... The train itself was fairly decent by Russian standards, though I expect it was probably built sometime in the mid-1970's...

The trip, all 5000 km or so of it, has entirely reaffirmed my belief that trains are in fact the best way to to travel. In the space of 3 days and four nights I managed to make friends with a WONDFERUL German couple, a pair of amazingly friendly (and exceedingly beautiful) Swedish girls, a Canadian girl from Vancouver (It's a very small world...), a satellite electrical engineer and his girlfriend on Vacation from Moscow, a trio of extremely drunk Latvians on their way east after two weeks of camping and hunting in the depths of Siberia, and a Tibetan/Russian martial arts Master who could (disturbingly accurately) read peoples palms... The latter, named Yuri, was my roommate for two nights. More on him later...

The German couple I mentioned, Miriam and Roland, a pair of social workers from Frankfurt quite brilliantly had the foresight to bring along a squeegee to try and clean the windows on the train in order to get a better view (When we boarded in Moscow the windows of our car were so caked with mud that we could hardly see outside at all, let along enjoy the scenery)... After nearly 10 minutes of scrubbing with soap and water the windows were sadly just as dirty as they were when we left Moscow.

(Below: Roland made a valiant attempt to clean the windows of his and Miriam's cabin. He received quite a few very strange looks from the babushkas on the platform, and many of the Russian passengers, largely because cleaning is a "Woman's job" in Russia. For a man to pick up a bucket of soap and water is practically unheard of... Miriam is in the background, holding a bottle of soapy water and looking on in amusement.)

The air-conditioning in my carriage broke on the first day, and the rising temperature (I clocked it at 35 degrees in my cabin) forced most of the people in the car I was in into the halls, where we staged a small coup and forced open several windows and jammed or tied them open with empy pop bottles and some string... Quite a few people in my carriage, including Pavel, the aforementioned satellite electrical enginner, went shirtless for much of the trip.

(Below: The ever-cheerful Pavel. His girlfriend, Olga, took more pictures than I did. Both were quite excited to see Siberia for the first time.)
(Below: Olga, beer in-hand and camera hanging from her wrist, at one of the many stops. Babushkas selling a variety of (to Canadian's) unimaginable foods, are in the background.)

The Swedish girls I met were perhaps one of the more random encounters I had along the way. I said hi to them after hearing two of them speaking English in the corridor of the train. (While many russians speak a few words, or even have basic English down pat, it's tough to find fluent English-speakers.)... One of the girls, Maria, a social worker (yes, another social worker) from Sweden and I ended up chatting for a few hours afterwards... Later that day I was distracted from the book I was reading (Eugene Onegin, by Alexander Pushkin. HIGHLY reccomended to any fans of literature.) by Maria asking me if I could "be her hero" ... One does not often get asked to be the hero of tall, blonde, and beautiful Swedish girls, so I of course obliged... Turns out she'd accidentally deleted all of her holiday photos from her digital camera and I was the only person on the train with a laptop and a copy of Lexar's PhotoRescue software (a rather handy piece of professional software sold with Lexar-brand memory cards and used specifically to recover deleted and damaged photos from memory cards...) ... 90 minutes of image-recovery later and I found myself one friend richer in the most unexpected manner. I was shortly introduced to the rest of the Swedish contingent, including Lousie, a teacher. The two together were irrepressably cheerful, and I spent a good portion of the rest of the train trip hanging out with them in the dining car.

(Below: Maria (left) and Louise at one of the many small stations along the trans-siberian.)
There were countless other interesting, friendly, and in general quite amazing characters on the trans-sib, but the last I'll have time to mention in this post is my roommate for more than half of the trip, Yuri:

Yuri arrived in my cabin on the third night of the trip at around 11PM in Novosibirsk. He seemed quite friendly at first, and it didn't take us long to determine that he knew even less English than I did Russian. Yuri's spoken vocabulary consisted of "Sit down please" and "Kung Fu", the latter of which I quickly learned he was actually an avid practitioner of... I learned very quickly that when the English phrase "Kung Fu" was uttered, it was often followed by a brief demonstration of one of the several martial arts that Yuri was quite proficient in. After the second or third such demonstration I learned to step back, very quickly (though often not quickly enough) whenever Yuri decided to talk about his profession...

Over the course of the next two days we managed to communicate basic information about each other through the use of several Russian/English bilingual people on board the train (Pavel and Olga, my next-door neighbours, being the most prominent among these.) ... Seems Yuri runs several martial arts schools across Russia, has just returned(brand new iPod in hand) from opening one in Atlanta, Georgia as well. I was somewhat skeptical at first, until he produced both business cards (bearing his name, and the title "Master of Asian Martial Arts" and several rather official-looking certification cards that, from what little Russian I know, I managed to gather were "Master" certifications in various martial arts... One of his other skills that I, as well as my Swedish friends, were introduced to, was his ability to read palms with (in my case) rather disturbing accuracy. Several of us (myself, the Swedish girls, another Canadian named Natalie, and a few Russians) were treated to a demonstration of Yuri's prophetic skills.

(Below: On the third day of the trip Yuri (left) joined several of us, including Maria (right) in the dining car and offered to tell our fortunes. Most of the westerners received somewhat similar news: None of us have any love in our lives. Similarities aside, a few of the details Yuri managed to conjur up were a tad closer to home than would be expected, especially given that he didn't share a language with more than half of us... )

I'm now several hundred rubles in debt to the internet cafe that I'm writing this post from, and need to find some food for my rather vocal stomach. I'll leave my more dedicated readers with a view of a Siberian sunset. Suffice it to say that most of what we've heard about Siberia in Canada is only true during the winter (I think) and that this place really is one of the more beautiful corners of the world that I've visited...

(Below: A Siberian sunset, shot through an open window on the train.)

Another day, another hurried blog post from a Russian train station...

... That may not be QUITE how the old saying goes, but it's certainly a decent approximation of my life these days...

St. Petersburg itself was absolutely amazing, and I really do reccomend anyone and everyone who has the opportunity to visit to do so. The city is the cleanest European city I've stepped foot in in my life, the people are amazingly friendly and warm, accomodation and food are both cheap (compared to Moscow at least.) and the scenery is amazing. The Hermitage alone needs a week, at least, to go through. I'm sad to be leaving so soon, and really do think I'll try and spend the better part of a month in St. P. the next time I'm in this neck of the woods...

I'm back in Moscow right now after 3 days and two night in St. Petersburg, and am currently waiting for train 006 to take me from Moscow to Irkutsk. The trip is about 4500 km and will take 3 days and 4 nights. If all goes according to plan I'll leave Moscow at 9:35PM tonight and will step off the train at 5:13 AM local-time in Irkutsk on July 23... What I'm going to DO in Irkutsk at 5AM remains to be seen, as I doubt I'll be able to show up at my hostel until 9 or 10AM at least... I'm sure I'll find something to entertain myself with...

That's it for now. I'm still hopeful that I'll be able to find wifi in Irkutsk (hopefully at my hostel) so I can throw a few pictures up.

One the move again...

This will be, as my last several updates have been, brief. My apologies again to those of you wanting some more in-depth information and/or pictures. Considering it's size, finding wireless internet in Moscow (especially near my hotel) is ridiculously difficult, meaning that these last few updates have been written on cyber-cafe computers, surrounded by 13 year-old boys playing Counter-Strike the like...

Moscow has been wonderful, and I really am a bit sad that I'm not staying longer. The city is gorgeous, the history here is astounding, and the people really are some of the friendliest I've met thus far... Highlights from the city have included eating a cheeseburger in front of Lenin's tomb, before bribing my way in just after closing (it seemed appropriate) and spending an afternoon reading a good book under a tree in Alexander's Garden, just behind the Kremlin.

On a more somber note, I spent half a day and visited Mitinskoya Cemetary, where the Chernobyl Heroes are buried. The monument above their graves is one of the most potent I've seen in the post-soviet states since I arrived. The monument itself is in the shape of a giant mushroom cloud. Standing in front of it a lone bronze figure, with radiation burns across his face, shields the 28 graves of the heroes from the radiation...

The Web informs me that my hostel in St. Petersburg has internet access. I should have a bit of time there to sit down and write some more, and if it's wifi, even post a few pictures from Moscow.

A McDonalds Cheeseburger in Red Square...

Dear Diary,

Today I ate a McDonalds cheeseburger in front of Lenin's tomb...

...

If I kept a diary, I think that would likely be one of the more bizarre entries for the week... This statement does, of course, mean that I've arrived mostly-safely in Moscow, and (after being evicted from one set of accomodations at 6PM on my first day here... It's a long story...) am now happily residing at a place called the Hotel Altai. I haven't had a chance to grab GPS coordinates yet, but I'll try and have them by the next time I post. Pictures are also in the works, though I can't find any wireless internet access in Moscow, and thus can't upload pictures as easily as I'd like... They're coming, I promise. This post, for the same reason, will have to be brief. Suffice it to say that I've arrived, have stood in Red Square (McDonalds cheeseburger in hand, no less) and am already happily darting around the town on the Moscow metro. My tickets to both St. Petersburg and Irkutsk (Eastern Siberia) are booked, and I'll be heading out of Moscow in 5 days or so.

My SportsShooter.com page has been updated...

This is just a brief note to tell everyone that my SportsShooter.com profile page has been updated with some more Chernobyl work. As always, I'd love some (hopefully constructive) criticism.

Got Milk?

My most sincere apologies to those of you who have complained about my somewhat infrequent blog posts over the last week. Things have been at once remarkably busy, and remarkably quiet. I've spent another two days inside the exclusion zone, one of which was spent entirely in Pripyat. I've had a few "down" days, getting a bit of rest, and had a few more days of driving around and talking to people. I've also tracked down a few people in Moscow that I've been trying to find for a long time, and have booked my train tickets into Russia (I leave Ukraine July 7 and arrive in Russia on July 8).

Most of today's work revolved around talking with an old couple living in a small town near Ivankiv. They've been pretty heavily photographed by other shooters over the years, but they were neat to go and talk to, and were wonderfully friendly. Vladimir and I arrived just in time to meet their cow as she returned from pasture and got milked.

(Below: Got Milk? An old couple's cow stops to say hi on her way back to the barn.)

(Below: Some more time in Pripyat let me check out School #2. I seem to recall that MY high-school classrooms felt a lot like this when I was a student.)

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Nic's Current Location:
Yaroslavna Hotel, Vasilkiv, Kyiv, Ukraine
+50° 10' 43.11", +30° 18' 49.24"