Spring Group Trip

We all successfully returned from Syeverobaikalsk, I am happy to report. Well, I’m happy that the return was successful, but I’m not all that happy with the return as a basic fact. Syeverobaikalsk is about the coolest place ever. I have no idea why people live in Irkutsk when Syeverobaikalsk is a mere hour and twenty minutes away by plane.

Early in our second morning on the train, we went through a very, very long tunnel. This tunnel just kept going, and going, as the half of the train that was awake fiddled with their teacups and sat on the edges of their beds and waited uneasily for sunlight. And then at last the tunnel ended, and our train glided on through a sunrise over bare, white mountains by little local stations half covered in snow drifts. And then, after the whole car was up and had gathered together their uneaten loaves of bread and remnants of cheese and unused packets of instant soup, and had folded their sheets and returned their blankets to the impatient, blond conductor girl, we pulled into the bright, modern station in Syeverobaikalsk. Our guide was waiting for us, and the marshrutkas into which we piled with our suitcases was new and clean and fairly large and drove us down the wide main street of a clean, crisp city with gracefully curving apartment buildings. After turning onto a few smaller roads, lined with well-ordered cottages, our marshrutka took us to a two-storey wooden house with a different color scheme in each of the three guest rooms upstairs and a table set out with bottled water. That natural conclusion was that the early-morning tunnel had taken us straight through the earth and we were not in Russia at all, but Colorado.

This impression was very soon corrected when we got to the “ski mountain” later that day, which I would describe more as “completely unregulated and dangerous mess,” but I may just be bitter because I was the only one wholly unable to figure out the pull-rope system and spent a lot of time being dragged about through the snow having Russian snow-boarders laughing at me. Or because I was given skis more appropriate in size to a 5-year-old. Or because Marina, our guide, had a very irritating tendency to rush about doing everything possible to humiliate one further after every incidence of incompetence. Anyway. Went skiing. Also, that day... tour of the city, before the skiing, and BAM museum. And after the skiing hot springs, which was fun but involved a lot of drunken Russians, one of whom yelled at Elisabeth a lot for trying to steal her tapochki.

Our basic activities, the whole time we were there, were playing in the snow and taking pictures of Baikal. There were other, more planned activities framing these two, but they were always just covers for the ones mentioned. So it was a good time. Everything was just very pretty, and clean, and free of traffic and trash and crowed sidewalks. One time some ice fisherman let us play with their equipment and try to dig holes in the ice and stuff, and we (they) caught a fish that we then passed around and took pictures with. By the time I got the fish it was fairly dead, but the fisherman kept encouraging me to slap it to make it wriggle around more, the better to take pictures with. The most amazing part, though, was when we passed off the fish to its rightful owners and they conclusively killed it: have you ever seen a fish being punched in the head? Luckily, Elisabeth has a film. I don’t mean there was demonstrative, needless cruelty to fish involved: it was a very matter-of-fact, quick-and-decisive head punching. But still. Another time we climbed a trail that prisoners in a Stalinist camp took to collect mica from the mines near the top of the mountain. Well, I don’t know how much of a mine it was- it seemed to me more like mica sitting around on top of the mountain. But anyway, it was a hard mountain to climb up and down, and I was glad I was not hauling mica, or being shot when I tried to stop. We didn’t actually go to the prison camp, as it’s too hard to get there in the winter, but we had the place pointed out to us from afar. It’s in this place in the mountains where in the winter the sun doesn’t shine at all, and it’s accessible only by ski. If I had a choice between that camp, which is famous and has a name that I should remember because it’s in the title of a book that I have read, and the camp that we saw on the most beautiful beach on Olkhon, I think I know which I would choose. I’m still confused by that Olkhon prison camp.

Our last night, clear and moonless, some of us walked out to Baikal and lay on the ice and looked at the stars. The next morning we took the same road and watched the sunrise over the mountains on the other side of the lake, slowly slowly in its winter course, but beautiful, and the red light hit the big, clear ice-blocks standing around us on the lake very impressively. When the sun had cleared the mountains a rainbow appeared, one of several we saw on the trip. For some reason I still don’t understand, there are a lot of rainbows in that area, though it never snowed or rained.