From Houston to Sydney 2013

Russian Far East - 2014

 

Today’s weather has been the best of the entire trip.  The air was crystal clear, the sky was bright blue, there was a gentle breeze to take the edge off the summer warmth, and unlike other days when clouds have formed over the volcanoes and hills that surround Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky during the afternoon, the mountains have remained in clear view throughout the day.

It would have been a perfect day to be on the top of a mountain, watching fumaroles or pools of boiling water.  Instead, my destination was considerably less ambitious – a farm known as Kaynayran to the north-east of Yelizovo.

We didn’t need to leave for Kaynayran until 11:00am, which gave me plenty of time to enjoy a leisurely buffet breakfast and go for an hour’s walk.  From the window of my hotel room, I had noticed a green metal stairway running up the side of the steep hill at the back of the hotel, so I decided to explore the area to see if the views were worthwhile. 

They were.  From several vantage points on the stairs, I obtained some wonderful views of the central city area, looking across Avacha Bay to the mountains on the other side.  In some places, tall wildflowers that resembled lavender covered the hillside, adding splashes of pink and purple to the already colourful landscape.

It was supposed to take an hour to get to Kaynayran, but it took a little longer than that as the driver found the place quite difficult to locate.  That was understandable, because although Kaynayran is labeled as a ‘village’ it is just a single isolated farm off the side of a very minor gravel road.  Getting lost a couple of times didn’t really worry me, as each diversion opened up beautiful rural vistas that I would not otherwise have experienced.

Kaynayran isn’t really a tourist destination, although I suspect its owners would like it to become one.  It is operated by a family of Koriyak people from the far north of Kamchatka, and they are using the farm to showcase Koriyak culture.  Their main business is horse raising, and their major interest seems to be competing in long distance dog sled races.

My visit was quite a eclectic mix of experiences.  After a somewhat cursory welcome, Maro and I accompanied the owner as he went into the horse paddock to feed his horses a loaf of bread.  There were a couple of young foals lying on the ground, apparently because they were not coping well with the summer heat, although a few slices of bread seemed to be sufficient to coax them to a standing position.

Next, we were taken to see two Kamchatka brown bears that he has locked up in cages.  They were also fed some bread and some grass.  I asked whether the bears are given salmon to eat like the bears in the wild are eating at the moment, and I was told that he had stopped feeding them fish because it made them too excited and agitated.  One of the bears was three years old, and the larger one that was four years old already weighed 350kg; the owner estimated it would be 600kg when fully grown, by which time it will definitely need a larger cage.

Because these bears have become used to the smell of humans, and they associate that smell with bringing food, they are now too dangerous to be released into the wild.  They seem destined to spend their days in captivity, and hopefully in some considerably larger cages.

We were then taken along a short track through the trees to a small creek that is a tributary of the Avacha River.  In this area, baby salmon were swimming, evidence we were told of the owner’s commitment to nature and conservation.  Apparently, there is a fine of 1000 roubles for anyone who removes a baby salmon from a creek or river.

That seemed to represent the end of the first shift for the farm owner.  Next it was his wife’s turn to show some hospitality.  We were taken inside the large tent (which in America would be termed a teepee or a wigwam).  This is the winter housing used by Koriyak people, and to emphasise this point, a fire was burning in the middle of the tent with the smoke rising through a hole at the top of the tent.  We were invited to sit on seats of reindeer fur, enjoy some cups of tea in plastic cups and some fried bread that is made from a type of flour which is produced by grinding dried salmon into a fine powder.

While we were seated (for a couple of hours), we were entertained by owner’s wife telling us traditional Koriyak stories, singing some traditional Koriyak songs, and describing traditional Koriyak culture.  One thing that I found especially interesting was the Koriyak view of their tent as being like a volcano.  Just as the tent contains the family sitting around a fire, they believed traditionally that the volcano contained the souls of the dead sitting around the fire (of magma).  Just as people threw their fish bones out the top of the tent at the end of a meal, so they believed the dead would throw stones out of the top of the volcano (in an eruption) if they were angry.

We were also told that the traditional Koriyak belief regarded the raven as a god.  However, raven did not create mice.  Apparently, the mice were created as a type of accident every time the raven left a footprint somewhere.  I couldn’t help feeling that it all seemed like quite a complex theology to reconcile with evidence.

The wife’s duties completed, we were ‘released’ from the tent – something of a welcome relief as the heat from the fire was over-kill on this warm summer’s day.  The farm owner then returned, this time to show us some of his prized possessions.  These were almost all to do with his competition successes in dog sled racing.  We were shown into two wooden log huts on which the walls were covered with his dog sledding memorabilia – photographs, competitor number patches dating back to 1999, commemorative T-shirts, several actual sleds, posters, and so on.  We were also shown, page by page with detailed explanation, his photo album of dog sled experiences, with special emphasis on the most successful dogs.  The one and only prized possession that seemed to have nothing to do with dog sled racing was the skin of a large wolf he had shot; it was hanging in pride of place on the central pillar of one of the huts.

Next it was dressing up time.  The owner’s wife and son appeared in traditional Koriyak clothing for photographs, and I naturally accepted the offer to dress in the same way.  When in Rome…

The farm owner then reappeared for the part of the visit that was clearly supposed to be the major highlight of the day for us – we were to be given a guided tour of his dogs, with detailed explanations of course.

Many of the dogs were huskies of various kinds (identifiable because of their blue eyes).  Some were extremely animated, hyperactively climbing the wire of their cages or running around in circles that were limited only by the radius of their chains, while others were so lethargic that they were just lying in any cool pool of mud they could find.  They were clearly feeling the heat, and some dogs had even dug holes for themselves and were lying in the shade so created, with little more than their nose or face visible – if that.  The smell was quite powerful (although not quite as pungent as the bear cages earlier in the day), but it was clear that the dogs were being very well cared for.  Unlike the bears, the dogs were being fed porridge and fish (mainly salmon).

Finally, at 3:00pm, it was time for lunch.  We were escorted back to the hut where we could admire the dog sled memorabilia once again while we dined on our traditional fish soup.  With lunch over, it was time to bid farewell, and return to Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky.

We arrived at the Avacha Hotel at 4:30pm, and after a short rest of 15 minutes, I ventured out for a relatively quick one-hour walk.  I was keen to see a road – Pogranichnaya Street – which I knew would not be especially picturesque compared with the waterfront area where I had been concentrating my walks, but which had some old, barely visible remains of Communist-era artwork on the end of one of the housing blocks.

The remains of the artwork were just as feeble as I had remembered from driving past in the car, but it was still good to photograph it; I doubt any of it will remain in a year or two.  My walk back finished with a close look at the T-34 tank that is mounted on a pedestal at the major road junction just in front of the hotel.  It was a timely reminder that although Kamchatka has a vast array of wonderful geothermal and other distinctive geographical features, the culture of the place remains deeply Russian.


Day 22 - Kaynayran

Tuesday

22 July 2014