Dear Mom and Dad,
I just got back from a weekend in Kamchatka. Three days was certainly a bit meagre for the peninsula 1.5 times the area of Florida and littered with a UNESCO World Heritage site of volcanoes, but I hadn’t seen my friend Denis in five years and he recently moved out there for work and to be closer to his fiancé’s family, so I decided to make the flight, as there aren’t any railroads there.
All the flights from Vladivostok leave at three am, so on Thursday morning I took a forty-minute midnight taxi to the airport for $14 and got there just in time to find out my flight had been delayed until 4:30. Then 6:15. Then a literal crazy cat lady sat next to me on the plane, yelled at her silent cat in a tote to be quiet, ordered the entire beverage cart so that she could dump her water on me and assault me with napkins. As far as I can recall, this was the first time I had told a stranger uspokoytes’, or calm yourself (formal you). Nonetheless I arrived at around 11, still another two time zones from Moscow, putting me at +9 from Moscow and +16 from Louisville. As soon as you step off the plain, if it is a clear day, as it was when I arrived, you are surrounded by the snowcapped volcanoes. I took a bus from the small city Yelisovo, where the airport is, to my Airbnb room on the northern side of the city, which, much like Vladivostok, is organized linearly with it’s downtown at the southern tip. I’ve never been much for sleeping in transit, so I took a nap before meeting Denis and taking a bus downtown to the oceanfront.
Kamchatka juts out into the Pacific Ocean forming the Okhotsk Sea with the rest of the mainland to the west and the Bering Sea to the East. Home to over 160 volcanoes, 29 of which are active, including the biggest active volcano in the northern hemisphere – Kluchevskaya – I soon found out that my three day trip would be painfully little, but as I am intent on making it across the country by train before winter sets in, I couldn’t afford to stay much longer. Seeing some of the pictures that Denis’s friend took on a summer excursion amongst the geysers and volcanoes, I made yet another mental promise to come back one summer and make a proper visit to the “land of fire and ice.”
Thursday evening we spent wandering the waterfront before heading back to this fiancé’s parents apartment for a nightcap. As he had to work the next day, I spent it exploring the city myself. Two of the highlights were Mishennaya sopka (hill) and Nikolskaya sopka, the former of which featured a winding dirt road to the top of a hill in the center of the city with a newly built wooden walkway at the top. As I made the thousand foot climb on a cloudy afternoon up the deserted road, I couldn’t help but remember all the news stories about bears wandering into the city I have read over the years. Alas, the greatest of the terrors I encountered was a wedding caravan that made its way to the overlook. While the clouds enshrouded the surrounding volcanoes, hiding them from view, the surrounding expanses and view of the city were nonetheless a thing to behold, especially as the sun fortuitously broke through the clouds as I reached the summit.
Next I scampered over to another overlook right in the center of downtown. This one, however, had just recently been renovated, with all paths paved in stone, monuments highlighted and restored resulting in a public park of exceptional quality, especially by Russian standards. As the high for the day was in the low 50s and I hadn’t the luxury of packing bulky winter wear, I took the opportunity to warm up and got some coffee while a light rain passed by. The day ended with drinks at a local Irish pub that might as well have been in Louisville (or probably anywhere else in the world) had it not been for the cover band sticking to national hits.
Saturday we took a short bus ride to some surrounding hot springs and spent the rest of the day roaming the city. On Sunday morning I was back on a plane to Vladivostok. This time the flight was on time sans cat lady and I made it back to spend the night before setting off today for the road back to St. Petersburg. First up is a ten hour trip to Khabarovsk, nearly 800 miles to the North. This will be now the fifth city I’ve been to since arriving back in August.
More to come soon,
Alex
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