From Houston to Sydney 2013

Russian Far East - 2014

 

At 9:00 am, we were scheduled to leave the (relative!) comfort and elegance of Magadan behind us and set out towards the northern wilderness.  At breakfast, we were told there would be a delay until 9:30 m.  We gathered at 9:30, and at last our vehicles arrived at 10:40 am.  Apparently one of the drivers had a family problem that needed attention.  We thus finally climbed into the huge Kamaz 4-wheel drive truck/bus for the journey north along the Kolyma Highway to our destination, the Dneprovsky Gulag Camp.

The reason that the Kolyma Highway is often referred to as the Road of Bones is that it was built under Stalin’s directive by prisoners, many of whom died from exposure and exhaustion, and their bones were used in the foundations of the road.  Grim as the area appears today, it must have been hell for the prisoners of the gulags in Stalin’s time.

These large Kamaz truck-buses tend to trundle along the highway at a steady though not fast pace.  Our journey was to cover a total distance of 260 kilometres, during which we made just three stops.  Even so, it was 6:00 pm before we reached Dneprovsky gulag camp.

Our first stop was at a small town called Palatka, situated 82 kilometres north of Magadan.  Palatka is a fairly unremarkable and typical Russian Far eastern town, but that was why it proved interesting.  Unlike the cities in European Russia, towns and cities in the Far East tend to be poorer, more run down and more provincial in their character.  We spent half an hour wandering the streets of Palatka, which was just about enough to cover every street in the town.

Our second stop was just a little north of Palatka, where an abandoned gold and silver refinery and its accompanying administrative building beckoned.  In a country like Australia, such an abandoned factory would be fenced off securely and perhaps demolished.  In Russia, such factories are simply abandoned and anyone brave enough can simply walk in – which is what we did.

The building was a health and safety disaster zone, with broken glass, deep open holes in the floor, rubbish strewn randomly and loose wires.  Amidst the peeling paint on the walls, one room sported the remnants of a colourful socialist mural, but otherwise the building was a bit of a mess.

Our third stop was our only long stop for the day; one hour at an abandoned town called Atka, 200 kilometres north of Magadan.  Marked by a huge hammer and sickle sculpture beside the road at the town’s entrance, Atka was a mining and service settlement that was progressively abandoned over many years, with the final abandonment occurring ten years ago in 2004.

Today, the town is a mix of intact but run-down houses interspersed with collapsing buildings.  It was interesting to wander around the town as abandoned towns are becoming such a common feature of post-communist Russia.

At 5:00 pm we were 240 kilometres north of Magadan, and we turned off on a side road (the Veselayar Road) for the 18 kilometre final leg to the Dneprovsky Gulag Camp.  Because the road (really a track) was so rough, with large bumps, deep pools of flooded roadway and several riverbeds to cross, the 18 kilometres took an hour to complete.

We stopped a few kilometres short of the centre of the gulag (where we were to camp for the night) at one of the tin mines that gave the gulag its productive purpose.  Dneprovsky Gulag Camp was established in 1941 under Stalin’s directive, and most of the construction occurred between 1941 and 1943.  The camp was occupied as a tin mining centre using prison labour until it was closed in 1954.  Many thousands of prisoners passed through the gulag, and most of those who came died in the camp because of the harsh conditions.  At any one time, there were about 1500 prisoners living and working under extremely harsh conditions in the camp.

Rather than drive the rest of the way to the centre of the camp, we disembarked and the Kamaz trucks went ahead with personnel to set up camp and prepare dinner.  We were immediately surrounded by dense swarms of the area’s infamous mosquitoes, so we donned the mosquito head nets that we had been asked to bring and sprayed ourselves liberally with insect repellant   Thus equipped, we undertook a 2.7 kilometre trek past several abandoned tin mines, the remains of watchtowers and barbed wire fences, following a ridge that required a long climb upwards of about 300 metres (1000 feet) through steep glacial scree slopes of unconsolidated (and unstable) sediment, and down an even steeper section of slope before crossing a river using a few logs arranged across the river bed.  During the entire walk, we were accompanied by a hunter with a rifle for our protection as bears are numerous in the area.  Today, the bears were elsewhere, although we did spot some recent bear tracks in the ground.

We reached the campsite at about 8:45 pm.  It was still light (although the light was failing because of the grey cloud cover), and fortunately the rain had held off through the entire trek.  We found the tents had already been erected, so after we chose our tent and retrieved our bags, we sat down at about 9:30 pm to enjoy a delicious dinner of fish soup – very traditional fare in this part of Russia.

Some members of the group headed to their tents to sleep after dinner finished at about 10:30 pm, while others continued to enjoy the light by sitting around talking until well after midnight.

With so much light in the sky, I was glad to have kept the eyeshades from my flight, and by wearing them I was able to create the illusion of darkness through the night, even though the sky never got truly dark.  It started raining at about 11:00 pm and continued steadily all night.  It was quite cold in the tent and sleep was not easy, but at least it was dry under cover. 

Day 4 - Magadan to Dneprovsky

Friday

4 July 2014