Home » Russia Mongolia » Travel to St. Petersburg and Mongolia (part II)

The train from Moscow to Byisk takes 63 hours and costs $40.My friend Vladislav D. and I prefer hard sleeper without separate rooms (platskartnii vagon). Our closest neighbor, a 16 year old girl fed us with food carefully supplied for her journey by her parents and told us a bunch of stories about her tough life. From Byisk we took a bus to a remote corner of Altay, village Yst-Koksa. The bus ride was 10 hours long and cost $8. After initial fight for seats the atmosphere in the bus became peaceful and friendly. Especially touching was the care which the entire bus took care of a straw hat of a young lady from the old believer village Mylta.

Travel to St. Petersburg and Mongolia (part II)

Alex Mumzhiu
2006-03-22 18:19:28

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Notes were translated into Russian by Olga Pavlova and is available at: http://nnberg.narod.ru/mumzhiu/
The translation is sometimes better than the original!

3.It is always difficult to choose which photo to send because Yahoo allows only three pictures to attached. From now I will put all pictures in my Yahoo Photo Album, which is open to the public and is available at: http://photos.yahoo.com/mumzhiu All pictures related to this issue are in Kamchatka folder.

KAMCHATKA

I came to Kamchatka aboard the merchant ship "Pacific Star" on Aug 29 2003. The Pacific Ocean was very pacific and as a result, the most memorable event of the trip was a little surgical operation, which I did on myself, by putting a stitch on my cut finger. A disgusting picture is in the Kamchatka folder mentioned above. Kamchatka is synonymous with the end of the world in Russia, and I visited the village at the end of the road in Kamchatka. The village is called Esso, which has nothing to do with the Esso oil company. I came to Esso by bus, then crossed the Kamchatka peninsula to Kluchevsk by bike and returned to Petropavlovsk by bus again. I slept overnight in a forest by the fire. Local people told me that I am crazy and bears may come and kill me. But my friend Vladia D. told me that Kamcatka's bears are good and well behaved creatures, and I trusted him. My food ration consisted mostly from mushroom soup. There was an incredible amount of excellent mushrooms there, see the picture. The village of Esso is the gem of Kamchatka and is the subject of interest of half a dozen international ecological and UNESCO committees. Many enthusiasts devoted their life to that remarkable place. They even have a large and good Internet page, however it cannot be accessed the normal way, it should be downloaded from the UNESCO site: http://www.iucn.ru/download/spring.zip Common feeling there is this: "Moscow forget about us. If Canada will not help, we will perish". Esso is in much better shape than the rest of Kamchatka, where unemployment is very high and it results in crime and poverty. In spite of it, most of the people I met are furiously patriotic and proud of Kamchatka. I can compare them only with Texans. I took a helicopter tour to Geyser Valley, the major Kamchatka attraction. One day tour cost $250. None of the many Kamchatians I met, was in Geyser Valey they cannot to afford it. It is a great place, which reminded me Yellow Stone park but smaller and less developed. Which is good.

On my last day in Kamchatka I almost froze to death because of... language problems. In India, China, South America and so on I never had problems with languages. Here in Kamchatka, while they speak normal Russian language, they have some small differences in the meaning of the words. I got to the high altitude of Multinsky volcano, where the Unique Geothermal Electrical Station is located. There was a cyclone and wind with snow was terrible. I asked passing drivers if they can take me down to the village Paratunka which is at the bottom of the volcano. They said NO. Only after several attempts I realized that they cannot take me to Paratunka, but can take me to the village Nikolskoe, next to Paratunka, but also located well below in a livable zone far away from that terrible storm.

Alex Mumzhiu
Washington USA
Nov 22 2003

PS: I am at home already for two months, which is too long for me. Don't laugh, I found support from very un-expected side: Famous model Lauren Hutton also cannot stay at home more than two months in arow and also travels to wild places for six month per year, see http://www.aarpmagazine.org/entertainment/Articles/a2003-10-14-hutton.html

So in my next TN I will tell you about my next trip.