Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum...

...and a bottle of bourbon, several bottles of vodka, a few more bottles of spiced rum, a couple liters of beer, several kilos of meat and fish, assorted noodles, a couple bags of charcoal, oh, wait

Dear Mom and Dad,

several liters of assorted juices, cans of chips, dried squid, some extra clothes, a camera and we were off!

As I was telling you, when I arrived in Vladivostok Thursday morning we were planning on leaving that same night on a 19:00 catamaran to the nearby island of Popova. In case you've forgotten, the city itself of Vladivostok is located at the southern tip of a peninsula jutting off the mainland of Russia's far eastern coast into the Sea of Japan. Stretching out from the peninsula are a series of islands, the first and largest of which being the island Russkiy, which, as of 2012, is reachable by car over the longest cable bridge in the world at 1.1 km in length - Russkiy Bridge. Further south is the second island in size - Popova. It has not been connected to the mainland, however, so it remains reachable only over the water. So having dragged all the above listed supplies down to the port, we boarded the ship for about $3 one way and set off.

Right at sunset. And it was quite the sight.

And in a little over an hour we were there.

We were picked up right from the port by Oksana, an island inhabitant who apparently was shuttling Aleksey and his friends not for the first time. We arrived at our little four wooden hut compound, set up shop in one of the huts complete with four beds, a fridge and a little counter top, ate dinner, had a few drinks and I apologized, but took my leave from the world of the waking at just past midnight while a 1988 Arnold Schwarzenegger movie called Red Heat (apparently it was the first American film given permission to shoot in Red Square - see perestroyka) played in the background; the terrible Russian voiceover has made it an island tradition.

The next day we needed to wake up at around 7:30 and run down to the port about 25 minutes away and buy evening tickets back to the mainland for Sunday. The catamaran “Moskva” makes two runs a day: one at about 8 from Popova and one at about 20:00. We wanted to catch the evening ship back (see the above listed supplies). So we woke up at 8:00, when ticket sales at the port had already ended until the evening. Aleksey remembered that Oksana was going into the city that morning and so he asked her to buy us tickets at the port in Vladivostok when she got there. So we waited in anxiety for her to arrive. And then the call came - no tickets left. Which meant bright and early we’d be heading back on Sunday morning. Not the end of the world, but the next best thing. We of course told no one that we overslept, but had arrived to the port that morning to find all the tickets already sold out. Perhaps that was in fact the case. The things we will never know…

Thunderstruck, I wandered off to the outhouse, as one does upon waking on in island in Russia. Still in a dense fog from the jet-lag and the general circumstances, coming back to the hut I stood for some time performing my morning ablutions at the sink (there’s one of these on every porch (there’s one of these on every house)) before opening the door to find to my unique bewilderment a young girl staring at me. After several seconds of eternity I blinked and continued to stare and not understanding a thing. I eventually decided to apologize and close the door, a decision which she agreed to with a nod. Backpedaling off the porch, I realized that I’d just near taken a shower on the neighbor's porch and walked into her identical to ours hut. I later made amendments by telling her my name is Alex.

Not to be discouraged by the morning’s setbacks, we had a hearty breakfast of noodles, a salad of tomatoes, cucumber and mayonnaise, herring chunks from a plastic container, some of grandma’s (somebody’s grandma’s) homemade pickled mushrooms and black bread, threw a few beers in a little day-cooler and set out to explore the island and go swimming.

Popova was first inhabited by Russians in Soviet times when there was a fish factory on the island. During the 90s when Russia fell into a state of disorder that would make the Great Depression blush, the formerly state-run (everything in Soviet times was state-run) factory fell to the wayside. What remains now on the island is a small village, a school and a series of “bases of relaxation” or, less literally, resorts made up of a store with supplies, little cottages for rental and a banya or two.

We swam at a nearby beach and saw that the resort Laguna also featured a North Korean beached fishing boat that had washed up in one of the storms. We breached the resort's territory amphibially and climbed aboard to investigate. No bodies to be found, which means that someone willingly abandoned the five liter bottle of kimchi laying in the hold of the boat. This seems like an appropriate place to mention that the worst thing about Russia by far is the lack of public toilets. Apparently these boats wash up quite often in storm season. People come along and take the valuables and then they just kind of sit there apparently.

We spent the morning and better part of the afternoon exploring the island's rolling hills and traversing the cliff sides, wading in and out of the water where necessary. Around 16:00 we arrived back at our huts as Aleksey’s friend Nikita had arrived with Aleksey’s girlfriend Ira on an afternoon trip the boat makes on Fridays. That evening our other four campmates - Kamal (an American friend I had studies with back in 2015 who just happened to fly in a day before me this trip to work on his dissertation (or so he thought)) , Sasha, Timur and Nikita’s girlfriend Nastya - and our eight person group was complete. And we dug in.

From the meat and fish prepared over a charcoal grill called a mangal, which is little more than a raised steel box filled with charcoal, to the beer and dried fish, shots of this and that in honor of he, she and it and the standard Russian techno remixes, Russian rap and rock, the classics of the Russian criminal music genre shanson and 80s disco hits a la ABBA playing in the background, I woke up at 15:00 the next day. The gang headed off to the beach, while i decided to stay behind and drink some coffee and stare at the cow that had wandered into our yard.

However, I too eventually wandered down to the beach to help lighten the beer load back to the huts, to which we eventually wandered for the beginning of night II, which was more or less like night I, but less, thankfully.

The next day we got up at 6:30. The owner of the hut complex picked us up at 7:20, loaded us into the back of his canvas-covered truck and drove us to the port down a rutted dirt road that had us popping like kernels in a popcorn bag. This apparently did not mix well with the (as we later found out) gone-sour honey-beer drink medovucha that Nikita had partaken of the previous night. So when we got to the port, Nikita ran off to investigate an abandoned concrete shack. A passing woman apparently tried to interrupt his investigation with an investigation of her own, which created quite the scene he told us all about, which also created quite the scene as he’s enthusiastic by nature and we stood in a crowd waiting for the ship to arrive. The ship eventually did arrive, we climbed aboard and just like that our weekend came to an end.

I’d say it was a weekend I’ll never forget, but as I said: rum, bourbon, vodka, beer, poison beer-honey drink…

It’s Tuesday now and Aleksey, Ira and I are about to eat cheese soup and then head down to the ocean front to eat Georgian food.

Thursday morning at 3 am I fly to Kamchatka.

More to come soon,

Alex