JuloLeaving ten-million Moscow, the easternmost great city of the Atlantic world ![]() To fly, in a barn-size Ilyushin 96, into the Siberian vast ![]() High and wide ![]() A third full ![]() Most look Slavic, more men than women ![]() Cops, businessmen, military in mufti, Siberian couples, rucksack hikers, very few kids ![]() Mysterious, immense Russia to be crossed to the Pacific ![]() Moscow-to-Kamchatka flight, the western Russian taiga to tundra to the Siberian ranges to the Sea of Okhotsk ![]() Before the railroad, ventured only on foot, on horseback, by telega, drogi or droshky, or from the sea around the Cape of Good Hope ![]() Much as North America was crossed ![]() Conestoga for telega, and Cape Horn for the Cape of Good Hope ![]() This trip an ultimate psycho-geographic undertaking ![]() The Ilyushin 96’s windows the viewing screens ![]() Climbing from the Moscow region and over the Urals, the westernmost wilderness is puddle lakes with the mid-June snow melt not yet absorbed and drained ![]() The surface from ten thousand meters perhaps seventy percent lacustrine water with no evidence of anything that is not totally wild ![]() Ob’ River country there below ![]() What must be the Tyumen Oblast ![]() The Ob’-Irtysh alone has a drainage ten times the Rhine’s ![]() Is a thousand kilometers longer than the vast Paraná before it swells La Plata ![]() Move around avoiding sun-side window glare and cloud-cover groundscape voids ![]() Window to unoccupied window ![]() To the best views, to peer down on the big mountain systems, to gawk as far as possible up and down the river courses ![]() To try to follow traces on the wilderness below ![]() Long, long all-light midsummer passage out along the ten-hour Eurasian taiga-tundra arc ![]() To Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky ![]() Over the splatterlake taiga, empty tundra and the broad and jumbled ranges of Yakutskaya ![]() And those vast river systems with names like exotic women ![]() Pechora, Yenisey, Lena, Yana, Indigirka ![]() Where all the way east on the way down into Kamchatka over the Sea of Okhotsk, skirt the upper reaches of the Kolyma River country ![]() Empty grandeur ![]() Pure geography ![]() Without the act of doing it, there can be no perception of what it is overflown across nine time zones of Eurasia ![]() Very rarely the trace of a pipeline or truck track, buildings only a few times and then only hamlets, yurts, or forlorn sheds ![]() Much totally vacant grassland ![]() With the texture of the rises, gullies and flats spread relentlessly ![]() Empty ![]() In the endless evening arctic summer-solstice light ![]() The gray early-summer reseda of northern steppe ![]() Then scrub conifer bush ![]() Then the snowy taiga ![]() The surface geography procession of deep wilderness Halfway there, the daily westbound Aeroflot Ilyushin 96, Petropavlovsk to Moscow, passes impossibly close with a startling whoosh ![]() Huge twin planes with intersecting courses like two ascending and descending gondolas counterbalancing on a funicular ![]() Hurtling flat out ![]() On the horizontal of the Eurasian ultimate ![]() In vivid clarity at over ten thousand meters, both flights in mid-journey probably traveling near the 900 km/hr top speed for Il96s ![]() So the intersect at something like 1,800 kilometers an hour ![]() A quick slam like a fast train into a tunnel ![]() Shaking our plane violently in the turbulence ![]() The other Il96 came out of the nowhere into which we continue to plunge ![]() Crews no doubt look forward to the daily encounter ![]() Pilots are hotdogs beneath their methodical attention to skills or they wouldn’t be pilots ![]() Putin uses an Il96, plenty of room with the cabin seating nine abreast ![]() A plane large enough for its country ![]() They feel like horse barns ![]() With an open vault, overhead luggage racks only along the fuselage’s sides ![]() Bound now for the foggy, volcanic Pacific Coast ![]() Big timber like coastal BC and the Tongass ![]() As in Alaska, turning to stlanik in the farther inland in the North ![]() Low-growing elfin cedar and dwarf alder, a meter to two meters high, impenetrable, once in it must search for paths through, go around, the ultimate thicket ![]() Stlanik and muskeg to tundra ![]() In two sailboats we’ll take coastal course on north along Kamchatka to barren Chukotka ![]() Kamchatka, considerably larger than Texas ![]() Chukotka, nearly three times the size of Kamchatka ![]() Thoroughly off away from the cluttered world’s psychobabble occlusion ![]() As if, like stlanik, self-centered neuroses are decumbent in the face of all that weather, all that space, all that open sea ![]() Russians acknowledge this ![]() They don’t think of Chukotka, Kamchatka and what lies south to Vladivostok and the slim North Korean border, as being in Siberia ![]() It’s their Far East ![]() Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, its second city after Vladivostok ![]() And the second largest city in the world unreachable by road ![]() A quarter of a million people in a city spread over volcanic hills ![]() Three snowcapped active volcanoes within sight of its port ![]() The latitude of Dublin but with Eurasia’s weather pushing across overhead ![]() Long dramatic landing path, slant down into rusty blue vitality of green alder bush ![]() A flattening rush of peaks, snowfields, long glacial valleys, tarns, slopes, down into the level willow-birch bush ![]() Come to ground at Petropavlovsk’s Yelizovo ![]() Into town on a road of speeding trucks swerving widely to miss potholes ![]() In the back of a right-hand drive old Mitsubishi Pajero from the boats’ agents ![]() Its seatbacks badly broken, Nadia and Serge in front jawing away ![]() Thirty kilometers into town with long views of snow-covered volcanoes the whole way ![]() Almost everything on wheels, or treads, in the Russian Far East is Soviet military surplus or right-hand drive rundown trucks and jeeps shipped north from Japan and South Korea ![]() Mazda, Mitsubishi, Suzuki, Subaru, Hyundai, Daewoo, Kia ![]() Off on side roads and in turnouts along the crowded Yelizovo-Petropavlovsk road, a Saturday morning serial road market is going on from truck beds and jeeps ![]() Summer vegetables, wild berries, and the goods, implements and tools that rural taiga-dwellers need to get along ![]() Nadia shouts back that we should stop on the way to the port for rye flour for Diablesse, the other boat ![]() Diablesse: Johan the owner, Mike the skipper, Ben the mate, Steve an engineer, Gennadiy the sled-dog owning guide ![]() Leonore: Dave the owner and skipper, Chris his son, Joe the mate, Kate the cook, Pavel the interpreter, me ![]() Diablesse a 28-meter centerboard sloop, Leonore a 25-meter ketch, the first private boats to make it to the Kamchatka coast in years ![]() They’ve been sailing in tandem up from Hokkaido ![]() The store’s inventory and its clients where we stop for flour before going to the boats is remarkably similar to two visited a month later in Nome ![]() Again, what it takes to live at the edge of the Arctic, the clothes, the hardware, the rigging, the tarps, the tools, the sundries, the food ![]() Still the feel of a soviet era grocery hall, with unexpected alternatives, yet a good deal like what it would be as a western European discount store ![]() Driving on to the port, Nadia is intelligently voluble about what goes on in Petropavlovsk ![]() Leonore and Diablesse are tied up stern-to side by side ![]() Trim and almost otherworldly this far north ![]() Vitus Bering’s Avacha Bay out beyond their bows with the three volcanic peaks in view ![]() The stupendous Avachinsky Volcano steaming away above the city, the inactive Koryaksky Volcano on Avachinsky’s flank, and the symmetrical Vilyuchinsk Volcano across the water ![]() Avacha Bay was the site of a Crimean War Russian victory over French and British ships ![]() Was where in the 1870s an American out of Seattle served as Petropavlovsk’s mayor ![]() We cast off early with crisp and clear with Avachinsky Volcano rearing off the stern ![]() Into the morning calm with murres, pelagic cormorants and a few sea ducks ![]() Vilyuchinsk Volcano dead ahead ![]() Swing to a course east by northeast for Cape Shipunskiy ![]() Bound for the Arctic Ocean, and after almost three thousand nautical miles toward the Chukchi Sea, and western Alaska ![]() Sail off at four and a half knots while up in the bow locker working on a solenoid problem ![]() Through a flock of crested auklets ![]() Crested auklets all in pairs, in Beringia through the earlier months of the year from Baja California ![]() As sandhill cranes come in great numbers from New Mexico, Texas and Chihuahua to nest on Russian tundra ![]() Near the dozens of salmon-crowded watercourses draining the two-thousand-meter mountain country of the treeless, empty Chukotka-Kamchatka borderlands ![]() All dead ahead in the month before Nome |
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