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Siberia 2004

Siberia: 2004

In the spring of 2004, my good friend Misha and I journeyed across the tundra, on an expedition launched by Oleg, who told me, "You are a lousy traveler in the Other World, but a good traveler in the Real World, so if you have a journey to make, you must experience the cold and hunger of the tundra.

This blog was written first by me from an internet cafe near Misha's house, then by Chris from conversations between us on the satellite.phone. But the phone froze up frequently, so I missed some of my posts and didn't make any Posts after Talovka.  For the real and complete story of the expedition, read Chapter 4 in The Raven's Gift.

As customary, this blog and all my blogs read from the bottom (oldest date) to the top (most recent date.)  So, if you want to read about the journey in chronological order, scroll down, first.

Village of Talovka: April 7, 2004

     Jon and Misha made it to civilization of a sort. Talovka is a tiny Koryak village where a few people manage a hardscrabble existence. It's pretty amazing that they get by, no roads, boats, or airplanes to connect them to the rest of the world. An occasional helicopter stops by but that's become very rare since the fall of the USSR. The mayor insists that they stay at his house. All the people are warning them that they in for a super-early break up which means that they will run out of ice and snow much earlier than usual. This trip seems to get stranger and stranger. Maybe there really was a bad spell that the baleen didn't fix. Both Misha and Jon are wondering about making it to the Arctic Ocean. Five miles a day average isn't really cutting it. All the villagers keep telling them about a guy named Dimitri who vanished for good while traveling under similar conditions.

So tomorrow we will head for another reindeer camp 80 kilometers away. The reindeer birthing starts soon, so we can hang out with the herders who stay with the herd 24 hours a day to keep the wolves away.

Struggling Toward Talovka: April 4, 2004

     Jon called in the middle of the night Friday. They're having fun now.  Last week it was so warm that the rivers were breaking up, but this week we've been battling -20 C and swirling blizzards that make it hard to see the black ice at their feet. Just one more of the enigmas of Siberian travel, even though they have been in horrendous blizzards there's hardly any snow so they've been forced to trudge over frozen-solid, hummocky tundra. The gear is getting a terrible thrashing. They are crawling like ants through the Siberian wilderness, lucky to make 5 miles a day. At this rate it will be two more long days until they reach the small village of Talovka. About 4 o'clock this afternoon they spotted a strange boat-like cabin on the horizon. This didn't make sense but they pushed on. The cabin was on a boat that must have gone aground a while ago, but the stove still works so they fired it up.

Finally the sat phone was warm enough to send out this dispatch. It's going to be a long strange trip and the Arctic Ocean< seems impossibly far away. Misha and Jon decided that they'll just keep on going and see what we find next in this land of extremes. If it warms up I'll keep you posted.

Between Vyvenka and Reindeer Camp:  March 30, 2004

     I expected Jon to call last night or the night before but he didn't. I'm not sure what the phone trouble was). Martha sent the following message by email, so I don't have any other details. - "Chris! Hello Chris! Nina just called. Jon and Misha called her, they were having trouble with the phone and couldn't get through to you. So the message is... all's well, we are between "Brigada" and "Talovka."

This means that they are now traveling by ski and kite. The Brigada is where we stayed with the reindeer herders the last time I was there with Jon. You might find Talovka on your atlas, it's on ours near latitude 62 north and longitude 164. This stretch is about 65 miles so we will probably hear from them again soon.

Vyvenka:  March 26, 2004

(This post and all those above it were written by Chris)

Finally the planets that determine the quirky Siberian airplane schedule lined up and we escaped  PK. Misha and I had been stuck, waiting for our flight for over a week and I was antsy verging on homicidal. We landed in Korpf, a small town on the east coast of Kamchatka, but the real point of take off for this crazy wander is the tiny Koryak village of Vyvenka. The only way to get there is a two-hour snowmobile ride south of the airport. Near the runway I spotted Sergei dressed in a sealskin mukluks deerskin pants, boxy canvas anorak, and a hatswith top corners that stand up like dog's ears. His face was grim, he had just barely made it. After a winter of record-breaking cold and snow, it had suddenly turned way warm. Sergei's honking, Russian-made Boran snowmachine had almost sunk through the ice into the Vyvenka River. The frozen river is our highway to the village. We hung in Korpf until midnight and snowmobiled into Vyvenka the next morning. Oleg's wife, Lydia met us at the front door. She picked off a bit of lint from each of our coats, and burned them in the shovel full of burning coals. Got to get rid of the evil spirits you know. Maybe it worked, it's down to -6 degrees C so we will head north for Nikolai's reindeer camp in the morning.

Huh?  Am I Even Still Stuck in Petropavlovsk: March 21, 2004

It's a beautiful spring day, sunny, about at the freezing point, and the plane hasn't flown yet and I'm still in PK.  They tell us that no one has plowed the runway in Korpf.  Apparently, the snowplow isn't crashed but the snowplow operator is. He's gone hunting, or he's drinking vodka, or watching TV, but he's not plowing the runway. The word on the street is that he does this on occasion. There are three flights a week to Korpf on three different days. But it's a bother to open the airport three times. So when he feels like NOT working, he shuts the airport for six days. Then he opens the airport one day and lets all three airplanes land. Today is Tuesday. If he keeps this plan going, we'll fly tomorrow. However another big storm is forecast for tonight. So we'll see. Earlier I wrote about the madness of modern Russia. Perhaps you didn't believe me. Well, the country has grown dramatically out of the ashes of the Soviet system and the economic collapse of Perestroika. But now I am face to face with a feudal lord who's fiefdom is the airport in Korpf and the planes will fly when he damn well is ready for them to fly.

Still Stuck in Petropavlovsk:  March 20, 2004

I'm still in PK -- and not because I want to be. A huge storm is battering 1000 miles of the Kamchatka coastline with heavy, wet snow and sporadic high winds.  We're bivied up at Misha's house, which is a zillion times more comfortable than a mountain tent on the tundra, yet I'm anxious to be on the trip, not almost on the trip. Unless I am on the trip already, in which case I would be foolish to wish myself to be uncomfortable rather than comfortable. Or something like that. Anyway....... Misha called Lydia today in Vvenka. Lydia< is our good friend who is closely associated with Moolynaut, the old shaman. Lydia asked if it were possible that I was possessed by some trickster spirit that was keeping me away from Vyvenka. I said that I didn't think so; to the contrary, I had been having a lot of good fortune lately and that it seemed to me that the forces were in my favor. Lydia wasn't convinced. Apparently, Moolynaut knows a spell that will exorcise a spirit that inhabits a person and brings bad weather to prevent that person from traveling. However, to activate the spell she needs some baleen and she doesn't have any baleen. Lydia and our friends Oleg and Sergei are racing around looking for baleen, so we can get the show on the road. The airport officials say that the planes will fly on Monday. We'll see.

Stuck in Petropavlovsk: March 18, 2004

I'm killing time in an internet cafe in Yelizovo, near PK. We were supposed to fly north today but it's stormy and the plane is grounded. We've had a few hassles with permissions and registration, so I'm pretty burnt on being in town. Last night we had a party.  One guy  toasted us: "There are many steps. Be careful with every step. Even a simple problem like a sprained ankle can be serious out there." Then the next guy piped in, "But with every step, you will be in a new place, so be sure to look around and appreciate it. Because when you take the next step, you will never be there again." Good words, good thoughts to think about as I walk the long road across the tundra.

Landed in Petropavlovsk:  March 15, 2004

I'm in Petropavlovsk Kamchatsky (PK), among friends. There's a little bit of a sticky eddy here, a day or two longer than I would chose, but I'm using the time to fine tune things. and to calm down.  On this morning's weather, the temp in Chukotka was -28 degrees C, about what I expected. Misha and I have been in endless discussions about snow conditions in continental and marine climate during the transition from winter to summer. Basically neither of us knows what's to be expected. We ask other people, and they too don't know. Our take off weight will be about 50 kg in the sleds, which is minimal if we have hard snow and a lot if we run into soft cold snow or mushy snow.  I miss you all; I'll be in touch by satellite phone from Vvenka.