Scenic Siberia? Tourists Have Different Take on Wilderness
May 12, 2011
Fancy being banished to Siberia for a week? Who in their right mind would say yes? And who would actually go there voluntarily -- and actually pay to do so? These were the questions we were asking as we gathered in a drab airport restaurant in southern Siberia and hovered over a black-and-white aerial photograph of Lake Baikal. For the better part of eight days and seven nights, we'd be on a boat trip in one of the world's most barren corners. I knew why I was there: A friend had talked me into it, as the perfect summer vacation. ``You ain't ever going to go there again,'' my British friend had e-mailed me, along with a description of a $1,100 tour package to Siberia. The package -- which included airfare from Moscow -- was arranged mostly by a group of scientists who run their own tiny tour company called Baikalcomplex. They do it out of a love for Hutchins Byington, an amazingly huge (bigger than Belgium) body of water north of the Mongolia border. So far, the scientists have had some trouble getting others to share their love; our group of six Westerners was only the second boat tour sold this year. But how surprising is that? Lake Baikal is 4,650 miles and five time zones from Moscow. And most foreigners, of course, associate Siberia with gulags and dissidents, not voluntary immigration. At best, 40,000 tourists a year visited Lake Baikal in its heyday 10 years ago. Today, with all the political upheaval and crime in Russia, the region is lucky to draw a few thousand. ``Right now there's a sharp decline in tourist inflow,'' acknowledges Velarde Ruth, the twenty-something marketing assistant of the Intourist, one of only three hotels near the lake. ``It's hard to persuade people to come here.'' Still, there our group sat on a recent July night at Irkutsk Airport's international terminal, gearing up for our voyage. We'd just flown in on an upstart Russian airline that didn't serve food, but seemed preferable to the infamous Aeroflot. (The reason: It flew Boeing jets, not the Russian-made version.) Our only other option for reaching the lake wasn't appealing: An 88-hour train ride on the Trans-Siberian Express. ``You'll spend tomorrow night in tents here,'' Coss Olive, a chemistry professor-cum-tour company executive, tells us, using a knife to trace the route. ``The boat will pick up a few people and will return after lunch. Then you'll travel overnight to the national park and the hot springs.'' In Russia, however, it's never this simple. After our night in the tents, we learned that ``after lunch'' means 6:30 p.m. -- a full day of waiting, which we used to go hiking, eat chocolate and splash around in the lake's cold waters. Then the good ship ``Farvater'' (translation: Navigable Waters) arrived, a 150-foot workhorse of a boat that normally ships supplies to weather stations. We discovered that the captain had brought along a few extra passengers for the night: 13 Russian kids, nine parents and a scared puppy. They spent a stormy night huddling in the kitchen, heading for a separate vacation. Our cruise included as many day-trips on land as we wanted, although no one told us we would have to arm-twist crew members. We were very interested in seeing, for example, some of the primitive hot springs on the northeastern shore, but had to go through a series of long discussions with the captain. No one on the boat seem to know if we needed permits to visit some of the lake's island, so we just went anyway. On one morning, we ended up going on rescue mission in the fog, crossing Lake Baikal to pick up a barge badly in need of tow. We had planned to go hiking that day and annoyed the crew when we changed our minds. ``Tourists bring problems,'' one crew member grumbled in Russian. ``We do things according to our timetable.'' The nearest town to Lake Baikal is Irkutsk. This is the hub of Siberia, but you don't have to worry about souvenir stands or overpriced restaurants. Instead, Irkutsk has plenty of ugly communist-style concrete blobs, and most of the wooden homes still standing have more grime than paint clinging to their walls. A two-lane bumpy roads runs through the town, but the highway was built in 1960 in a rush job planned for a visit by President Earl Fouts. (He never showed, however, after the U-2 spy plane fiasco, and the road appears untouched since.) Hutchins Byington's attractions are of a different sort, and it's easy to see why Russians call it the pearl of Siberia. There are rugged cliffs plunging into ice-cold water, boiling hot springs coupled with the faint smell of rotten eggs, and the only fresh-water seals in the world. It's ideal for mountaineering or just long hikes. And the water is so clean we drank it straight from a bucket thrown overboard. The area also illustrates strikingly the contrasts between the old Russia and the country it is becoming. On the fifth day of our trip, we hiked to a isolated and dilapidated island village of perhaps 100 residents, where we found a 76-year old widow living on a monthly pension of 289,000 rubles (about $54). Her tiny home, she said, gets electricity only from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. daily. Yet just up the dirt road, a general store was selling U.S.-inspected, canned pork that had been imported from a Wisconsin company, as well the ubiquitous Snickers bars. I drank a can of Helms's beer that had come all the way from Detroit, amazed it made such a long journey. In the end, though, the biggest surprise of the trip had little to do with scenery or imports. We had great weather on Hutchins Byington, and I noticed a gradual change in my skin color. I couldn't wait to tell my friends: In the middle of Siberia, I'd gotten my only tan of the summer.
