http://blogs.waytorussia.net/ Way to Russia Travel Blogs en-us Nucleus CMS v3.40 A© Weblog http://backend.userland.com/rss http://blogs.waytorussia.net//nucleus/nucleus2.gif http://blogs.waytorussia.net/ http://blogs.waytorussia.net//item/171 Solovetsky Island

You don't have to go as far as New Zealand to see this beautiful landscape. Just a 4-hour flight from London and you're at the Arctic Circle at the north of Russia. If you're looking for a real adventure on a budget, which feels like an escape to another planet, then this is the place to go.
St Isaac's at Sunset

Start in St. Petersburg during the famed White Nights and then travel north to Petrozavodsk, the capital of Karelia – a region of pristine lakes and forests that was once part of Finland. Then take a train to Arkhangelsk – an ancient Russian port at the Arctic Ocean and home to Solovetsky Monastery. The monastery is located on an island that is said to possess healing powers (you could have seen its beautiful landscapes in the recent Russian blockbuster "Ostrov"). Murmansk is 8 hours away further north, well inside the Arctic Circle. It's not as cold in Summer and you get constant daylight. It's almost the most northern Russian town, close to Norwegian fjords and is a magnificent place that fuses beautiful northern landscapes with the relics of a mighty Soviet port town. Flying back to Moscow is only 2 hours and it's going to provide an exciting contrast to finish your trip.

St Basil's at Night

Normally, you can organize this journey yourself – just get a visa, book the train tickets, and accommodation can be usually be found on the spot. If you don't want to bother about all the practical stuff, the UK-based Baltic Travel Company can take care of everything for you. For £1250 they will get you return flights from London to St Petersburg, 1st class trains between each city, and accommodation in Petrozavodsk, Vologda, Arkhangelsk, Murmansk and St. Petersburg. The price also includes tour guides, professional support in each city, and visa support. An extremely flexible company, they can also provide a tailor-made trip, from start to finish or just a part of your holiday, and give you advice on every aspect of your itinerary.

]]> Places http://blogs.waytorussia.net/index.php?itemid=171 Thu, 2 Apr 2009 09:24:34 +0400 http://blogs.waytorussia.net//item/169
China Travel Guide



We are also expanding the range of travel services offered through the website. Currently you can book hotels and hostels in China, and also buy China train tickets online, both for domestic routes and international routes (including the Trans-Manchurian and Trans-Mongolian departing from Beijing). We hope our new website will be of assistance to all our readers who are planning a Trans-Siberian journey.]]> Way to Russia http://blogs.waytorussia.net/index.php?itemid=169 Wed, 11 Mar 2009 10:50:41 +0400 http://blogs.waytorussia.net//item/168 http://www.andrewlmoore.com/view_project.php

Piano

]]> Places http://blogs.waytorussia.net/index.php?itemid=168 Tue, 3 Mar 2009 18:11:05 +0300 http://blogs.waytorussia.net//item/167 This is continuation of Part 1: Ekaterinburg – Yakutsk (BAM). The travelers drove all the way from Ekaterinburg through BAM (Baikalo-Amurskaya magistral) to Yakutsk, through the icy and snowy roads where temperatures rarely went higher than minus 34 celcius, and finally reached a bridge to Tynda. The bridge was broken, so they decided to cross over the ice.

Broken bridge in Siberia Russia

"After we passed about 10 kilometers pass Chilcha settlement, we made a 'pit stop' to add some diesel to the main tank from our canisters. Here we realized two things: the special antifreeze gel for diesel got frozen in the canister; the second, and the worst, thing was that the diesel itself in the task got also frozen...

Railway in Russia Siberia BAM
(you can still see the old military outposts on this picture of BAM railway we passed along our way to Yakutsk)

While we've been thinking what to do next, a big Ural lorry with some railway workers appeared on the road. They offered to pull us back to Chilcha to their base, where we could warm up our cars and melt the ice in diesel.That's how we got hosted by the real BAM builders. Using the opportunity to get to a warm nice place we made a dinner:
Dinner with BAM people in SIberia Russia

While our Land Rover Defender was warming up in a huge hangar, I was trying to understand why when the temperature is lower than minus 45 celcius, the heating inside the car fails to work properly. Previous night was quite uncomfortably cold, especially in the morning. It turned out that actually the heating switches off automatically when it's minus 45 because the cold air simply extinguishes the flame. So, using a typically Russian method – drill and hammer – I changed the system, so that the air would be taken in from inside the car. Didn't have problems with heating from then on.

We left our hosts and already in the darkness passed the remaining 200 km to Tynda. After passed the town, we finally reached M-45 motorway "Lena" and stopped for a night break. We started driving again early in the morning and after driving about 80 km from Tynda entered Yakutia.

Yakutia Russia

Land Rovers in Siberia, Russia

Yakutia met us with the most beautiful parhelions in the clear air (another name for this phenomenon in English is "sundogs"):

Parhelions or sundogs in Siberia, Russia

In front we saw Chulman settlment that was covered with a thick layer of smog or mist (which as it turned out was caused by a nearby factory).

Chulman in Yakutia, Siberia, Russia

There's almost no wind in Yakutia during the winter, and the further we advanced into the republic, the better we could see it. Even the lorries are all modified because of that: the exhaust pipe is placed as high as possible. Otherwise, a trace of mist behind the car will be hanging above the road for hours:

Truck in Yakutia

This is Evota mountain, which is 1601 meters high. It's hard to say where is the horizon, where are the clouds, and anything else. It's also actually the highest point of "Lena" motorway – about 1355 meters.

Evota mountain in Yakutia Siberia Russia

Everything around is totally white and it's quite hard to orient yourself – the horizon and clouds mix together. And huge elm trees far away actually turn out to be small bushes 1.5 meters high.

Elm trees elki in Yakutia Siberia Russia




Tommot - Yakutsk - Khadynga

A few kilometers before Tommot (about halfway along "Lena" motorway between Tynda and Yakutsk), the front driver Oleg Mayorov gets into an accident. While he was making a long left turn (which was also going upwards), Oleg noticed a car driving really fast towards him. Magically avoiding a head on collision, he turned to the side, into the deep snow. Nobody was hurt, even no bruises, and the car looked totally ok outside.

Car Accident in Siberia Russia

His Land Rover Defender is lying in a deep snow, almost on the side. We'll have to use winches to pull him out:

Accident with Land Rover Defender in Russia


To be continued...

This travelogue follows the story of Evgeny, who traveled with his friends through Siberia. You can read his other travel stories (in Russian) on his LiveJournal blog. If you want us to translate a specific post, leave a comment here.]]> Travelogues http://blogs.waytorussia.net/index.php?itemid=167 Mon, 29 Dec 2008 01:29:19 +0300 http://blogs.waytorussia.net//item/166


79% of Russians ate mandarines while celebrating.
57% of Russians considered the night of December 31st the most important holiday in the year.
42% of Russians started to celebrate at 8 p.m.


]]> Places http://blogs.waytorussia.net/index.php?itemid=166 Mon, 22 Dec 2008 21:36:41 +0300 http://blogs.waytorussia.net//item/165
A girl from Chernbobyl - by Robert Knoth

by Robert Knoth

The pictures are really striking – and not only because they show the human aspect of tragedy. His photographs also somehow transcend photography. Normal people in everyday circumstances, but the things they have to deal with – and you can see it in their eyes – are from a different world. It's possible to analyze what happened, but it's impossible to understand it or to come in terms with it. The radiation did not only cause deformations in nature and humans, it is also causing deformation of psyche. The everyday reality cannot be comprehended and there's void in between.

Perhaps as a way to fill in this void I looked for eyewitness accounts from people who experienced nuclear disasters. They just describe what they've felt, seen, smelled and heard.
SMELLS
The reactor was on fire. I remember one of my friends saying, "It smells of reactor." It was an indescribable smell.

I wouldn't say that there was no smell or taste. There was an odour, an inexplicable odour. It wasn't a spring or autumn smell, it was something completely different and it wasn't the smell of earth either. It made you cough and your eyes water.

“That spring, it was very hot,” he says, “and there was a terrible smell over the town as the food in refrigerators and freezers and the bodies of abandoned pets decomposed.”

The air, which by then was beginning to take on a metallic smell. It's hard to say what kind precisely, but it was unmistakably a metallic smell.


FEELINGS

The heat was awful. And he's still not back. He said later it was like walking on tar.

I could tell something was wrong, of course, as my chest was very dry and my eyes were burning. All of us, including me, were coughing heavily.

At the time, the scientists in the room observed the "blue glow" of air ionization and felt a "heat wave". In addition, Slotin experienced a sour taste in his mouth and an intense burning sensation in his left hand.


SOUNDS
One night I heard a noise. I looked out the window. He saw me. "Close the
window and go back to sleep. There's a fire at the reactor. I'll be back
soon."

It was here, as he clambered over heaps of fallen masonry and hardware, that he houted plaintively, his voice dry and tense from radiation, "Valera! Answer me! I'm here! Answer me!"

In Pripyat, you can imagine what life would be like after a nuclear war. Silent. The only sound is the steady tick tick from Yuri’s radiation dosimeter.

We had good jokes. Here's one: an American robot is on the roof for five
minutes, and then it breaks down. The Japanese robot is on the roof for five
minutes, and then breaks down.
The Russian robot is up there two hours! Then a command comes in over the
loudspeaker: "Private Ivanov! In two hours, you're welcome to come down and
have a cigarette break."
Ha-ha!

All day on the radio they were telling people to prepare for an evacuation: they'd take us away for three days, wash everything, check it over.

I remember one thing: we're on the bus, everyone's crying. A man up front is yelling at his wife. "I can't believe you'd be so stupid! Everyone else brought their things, and all we've got are these three-liter bottles!"

The other day my daughter said to me: "Mom, if I give birth to a damaged child, I'm still going to love him." Can you imagine that? She's in the tenth grade, and she already has such thoughts.



SIGHTS
I didn't see the explosion itself. Just the flames. Everything was radiant.
The whole sky. A tall flame. And smoke.

I can still picture the bright raspberry glow; the reactor radiated light from within somehow.

We stood in the horrible black dust ... talking ...breathing... admiring. We did not know - that death could be so beautiful.

All around, on the asphalt, now blue in the sunlight [...] they saw pitch-black pieces of graphite and even whole assemblies of graphite blocks. There was graphite everywhere, it seemed.

I took my daughter and my wife to the hospital. They had black spots all
over their bodies. These spots would appear, then disappear.

I saw him. He was all swollen and puffed up. You could barely see his eyes.

The burns started to come to the surface. In his mouth, on his tongue, his cheeks - at first there were little lesions, and then they grew. It came off in layers - as white
film ... the colour of his face ... his body ... blue, red , grey-brown. And it's
all so very mine!

When he died, they dressed him up in formal wear, with his service cap. They couldn't get shoes on him because his feet had swollen up. They buried him barefoot. My love.

I couldn't sleep at night. I'd close my eyes and see something black moving, turning over - as if it were alive - live tracts of land, with insects, spiders, worms. I didn't know any of them, their names, just insects, spiders, ants. And they were small and big, yellow and black, all different colours.

As we were leaving Pripyat there was an army column heading back in the other direction. There were so many military vehicles, that's when I grew frightened.

We dug up the diseased top layer of soil, loaded it into cars and took it to
waste burial sites.

(some material above is from Green Global)



There's another photographer, Igor Kostin, who was taking the pictures directly at the events. The white stripes you see at the bottom of the photo actually come from radiation. They look like photographic experiments with ghosts, only this time it's tangible and real.

Kostin liquidators in Chernobyl


And here's a really rare footage of the burning reactor itself:
]]> Thoughts http://blogs.waytorussia.net/index.php?itemid=165 Fri, 19 Dec 2008 21:28:25 +0300 http://blogs.waytorussia.net//item/164
The first one in the series is an epic journey made by Eugen Belayev and co (check out Eugen's blog – it's in Russian, but has lots of pictures). They drove through the whole country from Ekaterinburg through BAM (Baikal-Amur Railway) to Yakutsk (that's in the middle of Siberia) and back to Moscow in winter(!). Here's the first part of their journey.

Driving through Siberia

"Our expedition started in Ekaterinburg, went through BAM railway area, to Yakutsk and back to Moscow. You can't normally get to Yakutsk by car (sane people fly there), but we were up for the challenge. The most interesting part of the journey started when we reached the road that goes along BAM railway

Kalabar mountain range Russia

Almost the whole day we've been driving through Kalabar mountain range. The road goes right next to the cliffs at some point and there are very few villages along the way – almost none.Car in the snow in Siberia

Surprisingly enough, it's actually easier to drive at some parts of the road during the winter. As you can see on the photo above, the road would be quite bad in summer, but in winter because of the snow, it's quite manageable.

A station along BAM railway in Russia

It gets dark early and we arrive to Novaya Chara in total darkness. That's a relatively big settlement with more than 2000 inhabitants. It should be easier to drive from here to Tynda along "Auto"BAM, as we've already passed the "wildest" part of the route.

We asked the locals whether there was a petrol station around – turned out that there's one 20 km away in Chara (another big settlement). We needed diesel, so went to Chara straight away even though it was quite late. The road was surprisingly good – asphalted and cleaned. Chara turned out to be quite interesting. There's an airport with regular flights to Chita, and petrol station is 1km away from it. At the petrol station they tell us that the road to Khani (our next destination) is covered with ice and that it's going to get colder (it's already minus 45 Celsius outside!) It's a pity we haven't got time – Chara has a regional museum and a sand desert with beautiful nature (check out the pics in this guide to Chara in Russian).

Barrels in the night snow ice road in Russia

After Novaya Chara the road gradually turns into an offroad route and after we crossed Khani river, the ice crust that we'd been warned about has started.

Two hours before us a big 157 ZIL lorry has fallen through into the ice crust. The ice crust is a weird thing: seems like it' minus 40, but then an underwater stream doesn't get frozen and continues to flow under ice. You can't see it from the outside until you fall through. And the stream might get frozen at some points, but then the water gets outside, so you get a sort of layered 'pie' made of water and ice. The ice crust gradually increases its height, so that the whole car might fall through.

That's the kind of problem the lorry before us had. The two guys who were inside managed to save the car – chucked out all the load, ten 200-liter barrels with diesel, and somehow managed to drive out of the ice hole. By the way, it was 1 meter deep... Had they waited for half-hour, that would be it: they'd have to wait till spring. When it's minus 45 the car gets frozen in not just quickly, but very quickly....

barrels in siberia stuck in snow

But then they were stuck: you can't carry and load back 2 tonns of diesel in barrels on your own. So we joined in and helped the guys through all the barrels back into the lorry. They tried to ask us how they could thank us, but we refused to accept anything.

Driving through the ice in Siberia

Finally we came to the agreement that they will just drive together with us, to make sure we get through ok. We planned the route, attached our Land Rover with a towrope, and drive along the side of the ice crust. Weirdly enough, even though we checked the depth half hour ago, our cars drove on top of the ice crust just fine. So the whole convoy went through just fine.

Finally, we're reached the road from BAM to Tynda

The bridge through Tazy river was completely broken. So we decided to drive over the ice.

Tazy river broken bridge in Siberia


(to be continued...)

]]> Travelogues http://blogs.waytorussia.net/index.php?itemid=164 Thu, 18 Dec 2008 16:10:57 +0300 http://blogs.waytorussia.net//item/163 However latest policy of gaining state control over economy through state controlled corporations brought some results.
In new Russia, state provides job for 48% of the national workforce (in USA the rate is 14%).

]]> Places http://blogs.waytorussia.net/index.php?itemid=163 Wed, 10 Dec 2008 15:41:44 +0300 http://blogs.waytorussia.net//item/162 offered to create patrol units, which would help police to keep the public order on the streets. This goes in line with a their general militant stance: a couple of years ago some orthodox priests were protesting against gays and you can often see them marching together with nationalists at parades.

Kommersant Photo / Orthodox Church
(photo by Kommersant>

If you haven't read Sorokin's latest book "Sakharny Kreml" ("Sugar Kremlin") – you should. He's writing about Russian in 20 years time where the modern technology fuses with barbaric medieval customs reminiscent of Ivan the Terrible times. If the Russian church was given all the freedom it wanted I'm pretty sure Sorokin's stories wouldn't seem so fantastic.

]]> People http://blogs.waytorussia.net/index.php?itemid=162 Thu, 20 Nov 2008 16:04:54 +0300 http://blogs.waytorussia.net//item/161
Surprisingly enough, the Russian president Dmitry Medvedev has started doing exactly same thing already a month ago. If you go to the Kremlin site you can see all three addresses translated in English.



However, does it really mean that the government worldwide is becoming more "transparent"?If one watches the both addresses, one striking detail is that both presidents are not really open to feedback. It's evident that their are merely utilizing the new media opportunities to communicate their message to wider audiences. In this sense, Obama is a bit more open because at least YouTube allows comments (which are mostly stupid) and video responses (which may be quite stupid as well). Medvedev posts his videos on his own site (although you might be able to find them on Youtube as well).

Today's article in technology blog Read Write Web Lidija Davis is making a good point writing that using more information channels does not automatically means transparency. If the both presidents are really keen on engaging with the public point of view, they have to utilize the technology to the full extent, using the social services, which allow two-way communication. ]]> Thoughts http://blogs.waytorussia.net/index.php?itemid=161 Sun, 16 Nov 2008 18:04:58 +0300