Tayshetsky District, Russian Federation

I’ve been noticing these round brick towers with a wooden section on the top. About 50 metres tall and about eight in diameter. They’re located invariably next to the rail line, sometimes at a station and sometimes at some signal box. They also tend to have mobile phone transceivers on them as well. I don’t know what they’re for but their older style architecture would suggest maybe a security control purpose in the past. I’ll have to find out. PS: the provodnitsa reckons they’re water towers. This would explain some of them but not all.

Krasnoyarsk, Russia

Breakfast in the restaurant carriage for the first time this morning. Start of day two of this trip from Tyumen to Severobaikalsk. Sometime during the early morning we crossed from Western Siberia to Eastern Siberia.

In the restaurant car they’re not quite ready yet. I help the woman rolling out the restaurant aisle carpet to pull it straight from my end. She has an horrendous chest cough and tells me between barks that they open at 05:00 Moscow time. The clock on the wall says 04:15 like all train and station clocks do across Russia. Local time though is now four hours ahead. Since boarding this train I’ve moved through two different time zones, each an hour head. Another woman without a cough but a bark worse than her bite comes to serve me after 04:30 Moscow time. She’s an enormous lady with a posterior like a bus and as she turns away to shout my order of meaty soup with pickle juice to the scruffy looking cook at the end of the carriage, she nearly knocks me in the head.

When I came in she was shouting at the cook and looked quite angry. But maybe that was just her way. For all I know she could have been describing a lovely holiday she had just been on.

It’s been pretty much flat across the route taken so far. But this morning I woke to a more gently undulating landscape, with dark hills of thick pine and beech. Occasional open fields look abandoned with what looks like forest regrowth scattered around the margins. What I presume to be vetch is flowering patchily across open fields in its bursts of crimson glory. The chest cough lady tells me it’s called chai, which is tea in Russian. Staring out the window, a lovely change from the dormitory atmosphere, I am wondering who owns the land across this vast country.

After the delicious soup I ask for something more. Most of what I point to on the menu isn’t available. Bus bark lady leans over and helps me with a kind smile. I order some Siberian salmon caviar on bread and she promptly turns and shouts that one through to the cook. It comes with glacial slabs of deep yellow butter on white crusty bread. The lustrous orange caviar sits atop the butter slabs like mountains of sparkling gems.

After breakfast the woman with the bark worse than her bite sits facing me at the end of the carriage, having occasional shouted conversations with the chef while doing her make up with thick black eyeliner and bituminous ebony mascara applied with a deft left hand.

A ploughed paddock of dark black soil appears. And then some low green crops. Then as the landscape falls away to the north from the train tracks I spy a large orderly landscape of big cropped paddocks and tree lots. Then we’re back into closed beech forest and suddenly an abandoned Lada sedan overgrown with bracken.

It’s overcast and foggy out. Train’s pulling in to a station. Time to stretch the legs.

Tayga, Russian Federation

(23:00, 3 July) I’m on the train somewhere east of a Siberian town called Taiga (ТАЙГА) and I can’t sleep. No fetid fug this time. Actually rather comfortable. The guy on the other side of the aisle has opened the top window fully and a welcome cool breeze blows about the dark of the dormitory carriage now. I seem to have man-handled the lumpy mattress enough and have rid the knot that was right where the small of my back lay. I still don’t fit length ways in the narrow slot I’m cradled in high above the aisle. People walk past their heads just below my sleeping plane. There are nine partitions with six beds in each. Four on the long side of the aisle (two up, two down) oriented perpendicular to the direction of travel. And the other two, one above the other, are on the narrow side of the aisle oriented parallel to the direction of travel. There are two toilets, one either end of the wagon, no separation of male and female, and are shared by all 54 occupants. They’re a bit old and appear dirty but the provodnitsa, who occupies a special room and ‘office’ at the end of the carriage where the samovar (water boiler) is, has a regular cleaning program. They are simple toilets with a foot pedal that opens the metal pan like a trap door and water flows to rinse the contents onto the noisy track racing past below. Up to my second provodnitsa on this journey. It’s a tough job. I was standing leaning on the exit doorway on the north side looking out its window for a while before. Admiring the endless taiga. Noting little boggy tracks leading deep into its emerald green interior. Wishing I could jump off and tread silently into the woods. Every now and then an oncoming train would zoom past clickety clack just metres away. A ghost town of tired wooden buildings drifted past my view like a hole in the taiga and time. Dark brown log houses with wooden shingle roofs, surrounded by overgrown vegetable gardens. Little cemeteries with colourful iron work fences barely visible for the brambles and bracken. And lane ways and paths almost indistinguishable for the crops of weeds and bushes growing where children once rode bikes and passersby stopped to chat with each other on the uneven ground. Once sustained by soviet nation-building arrangements these villages subsequently floundered in the post-soviet period of economic rationalisation. Gone are the people. Probably older people too. Gone where? To high rise apartments in the cities perhaps. To look out their windows to the taiga now far away. And dream of when the taiga was their train in life.

Novosibirsk, Russia

Omsk, Russia

Tyumensky District, Russia

Last night after a half-day rest holed up in a room of Hotel Vostok – a renovated ex-Soviet office block monstrosity near the centre of Tyumen – I caught the midnight train coming from Moscow to Tynda. I’m going as far as Severobaikalsk but that’s 60 hours enough for one journey man.

In the hotel lobby checking out I realised my train didn’t leave for another few hours. I got them to order me a taxi for 22:30. I sat down in the lobby to put a new screen protector on my camera display screen and take a slow beer. Leaving my backpack at the reception I headed into Tyumen’s centre to see the Tura River and the cathedral. A massive riverside beautification had taken place with a terrace of paths, platforms and linking stairways. But the vista was an industrial one with a chimney stack dominating the river valley views. The sun set down Tyumen’s main street was intense as the sun hung for a long time as a brilliant red ball obscured by the smog across the region. I thought there might be some taiga fires causing this as well.

The buses didn’t come as regularly on the way back and I was anxious when the time for my taxi from Hotel Vostok. came and went and I was still a half hour walk away. But a bus did come and I got back to the hotel at 23:00. They ordered another taxi and when it arrived at 23:20 I politely said ‘bistra, bistra’ to the driver and he obliged. At the station, where I’d been a week before on the way to Novy Urengoy, I had half an hour before departure.

My ticket didn’t include the bed linen so I bought that from the obliging provodnitsa for the very exact price of 101.40 roubles.

My dormitory companions to start with kept to themselves. The next morning as we all awoke and crawled out of our cots seeking hot tea and bread for breakfast I introduced myself and soon the bare-chested beer-gutted Vitalik was offering my vodka shots across the aisle. Elderly widow Tamara was travelling to see her brother in Novosibirsk. And Vladimir (Valodya) was happy to talk a little without vodka!

Nefteyugansky District, Russia

Bus en route from Khanty-Mansiysk to Tyumen

I’m glad I’ll be back on the train line today. It’s early morning and the fug on this bus is at once full-on, over ripe and fresh and by turns sweet, sweat stale and offensive. I’m sitting sideways with my legs into the aisle as the sun rises deep blood red on the horizon (we’ve come far enough south now I noticed overnight to have a few hours of darkness) and cleared areas amongst the now tall taiga have a blanket of fog hugging the ground. My right elbow gently rests on the huge belly of the young guy occupying more than his seat next to me. They only turned the air conditioning at the start and then once earlier on this twelve hour trip from Khanty-Mansysk. I can’t wait hit it to be over. Gonna book into a hotel in Tyumen for at least a shower once I get to the train station to find out the schedule of the next train to Severobaikalsk on the northern shores of Lake Baikal – my next destination I think. It’s been two and half days on the river and road (and floor) since the Arctic Circle at Salekhard!

Khanty-Mansiysky District, Russia

Towards the end of the day on the hydrofoil I met some new young lads. First was a young serious robot-like Artyom who was a youth member of the alliance between the two leading parties in Russian politics: the United Russia party and the United National Front party. He gave me a pen with the logos on it as a momento.

On the observation deck I was asking Artyom what time do we arrive. But he didn’t understand my question and young Dmitri (17) who was standing nearby overheard and asked what I was trying to say. Soon I was talking with him and his mate Andrei (15 but taller than Dmitri). They were both great fun and Dmitri was enjoying practicing his English. I asked Dmitri for his help once we reached Khanty-Mansiysk to buy a bus ticket to Tyumen. No trains from Khanty. They were doing the same and they were more than happy for me to tag along with them.

As we sped closer to Khanty-Mansiysk a fan Valyera, who must have seen me play guitar in Мужи and who on first impressions I thought was slightly drunk but was just actually very friendly, was keen for me to play songs for his mate – a music lover who would come to the station at Khanty. I agreed but said in earshot of Dmitri that my first priority was checking the bus timetable to Tyumen.

We got to the confluence of the mighty Ob with the Irtysh River, which the hydrofoil entered to head up to Khanty-Mansiysk. Up ahead I saw a gleaming city with brightly coloured modern apartment blocks, a church on the hill above the city with its gleaming gold cupolas and a massive pyramidal obelisk on the hill top above the river and the city.

Bus scheduled to leave at 21:00 hours but we had to wait to buy tickets directly from driver. There was no time for a shower. So I suggested beers and zakuski all round. Left our packs at the luggage storage service at the bus station which was right by the river port and after a visit to the shop we found an empty bench to share. There were three extra friends of Dmitri and Andrei who had been waiting to meet them at the river port. They were all between 15 and 17. I played a few songs and Sergei, my brother red head, played some tunes, which had the whole group singing along. We had the attention of other river side park wanderers as well.

Beers consumed we headed as a gaggling bunch back to purchase our Tyumen tickets from the bus driver now in. This would be my first long distance non-train trip. And it didn’t auger well from the start when I couldn’t find a seat space that was big enough for me to sit in!

Andrei sitting next to me played me the Russian rap song he’d written and composed. I was very impressed. He then said in his rudimentary English that he would miss me when I was gone and then promptly turned and lay his head on my shoulder. I wasn’t sure if he was seeing me as a father figure or not. I was sure old enough to be their father. I decided that this seat wasn’t big enough and moved up the back for a while. Tired and irritable I wasn’t in the mood for consoling young teenage boys.

I eventually moved again and ended up beside the biggest guy on the bus with the worst body odour and opposite the lady with the chihuahua on her lap breathing foggy doggy breath my way (see Fug Bus entry).

Berezovskiy, Russian Federation

Hydrofoil from Salekhard to Berozova to Khanty-Mansiysk. Today I am on the river boat (old hydrofoil) heading south along the giant Ob that empties half of Siberia from the Altai Mountains on Russia’s southern Siberian border north into the Arctic gulf here at Salekhard. It will be two days by boat up the Ob River to Khanty-Mansiysk, that is if the current four hours of broken slow engine and less than half speed pace resolves itself. It will then require a twelve hour bus ride further south to Tobolsk or Tyumen, in order to be back on the main east-west line to then be in a position to be able to head east toward Lake Baikal. Earlier in the morning before the 10:10am hydrofoil departure I played guitar on the floating river port hotel and made friends with the river boat land management crew. The police arrived to check the arriving passengers’ documents and prior to the arrival of the incoming boat they took their uniform hats off and sat down in the upstairs area to listen to the strange ‘strangled sounds of the foreigner’. The disembarkation process was a crush of human flesh made especially excruciating as the police checked everyone’s documents. It seems that in these autonomous districts of northern Russia and with Salekhard being a ‘closed town’ that these checks are obligatory for all incoming passengers. The Berozova hydrofoil, which had seen better years, was almost fully boarded but river port top boss Anton (a young dark-haired lanky man with a leaders aire and an open disposition) asked me to wait another five minutes: he wanted the crew to say goodbye. From inside the boat I realised that my ticket had not been sighted so I proffered it to Sergei (Anton’s newby also from Novosibirsk – capital of Western Siberia way up the Ob in the south), but Anton stepped forward and with a big smile said that I need not show my ticket anymore. “Just play guitar and Russian police will wave you through all the way to Vladivostok!”, he quipped in his heavily accented English. Slitting in front of me were mine workers heading back to home from the underground chromium mines in the still snow-covered Northern Urals, which I could see in the distance to the north-west and west of Salek********e of them, Radik, was very forward. He immediately offered me food and a shot of vodka. Up on the tiny open air observation cockpit, where everyone gathered to smoke (and it seemed like indeed everyone on the boat smoked, much like my impression of all Russia) he’d asked to look through my binoculars and revelled in telling the others of their specifications. Soon he was flicking his throat again with his finger caught behind his thumb in a repeated fashion. This meant vodka shots. I replied in the appropriate manner, adding the Russian colloquial word for ‘just a little’ (chuyt chuyt). Radik and his mine working friends were very friendly. One of them spoke Tartarin. And around me I was noticing Finni-Ugrik people, as well as Yamal and Nenetsy people. And as we went further south, Khanty and Mansi peoples. Their facial features reminded me of Inuit. Some of the older women were in traditional bright floral dresses and scarves. As the day progressed I soon realised that we weren’t going as fast and that the boat wasn’t hydroplaning as hydrofoils should. Turns out there was a breakdown of a key motor. The onboard grease monkeys were onto it and had turned the rear passenger salon into a mechanical workshop with engine parts scattered about on the floor. Meanwhile the boat was on normal stern propellers and going less than half normal top speed. Radik soon turned out to be very manipulative and I started to trust him less despite his largesse with vodka shots and tasty zakuski. He became very possessive trying to not let others talk to me. He started saying that he’d like me to come to his home and stay with him and his wife. And take banya together. The Russian way. Sitting in the cramped seats of the forward salon, he’d slap toilet paper on my knee, put the open can of tinned fish on my leg and shoving a torn off piece of black bread into my hand he’d say ‘Eat!’ And more vodka was poured. It was pleasant and mildly amusing but his pushiness was wearing thin. At one point on the observation cockpit he was saying something to me, which I wasn’t understanding anyway, but to which I was nodding vacantly as I observed through the binoculars the apparent cropping on the fertile plains of alluvial soil above the steep cliffs cut though by the river. Whatever he was saying got the attention though of another man who seemed to tell Radik off and for him to stop hassling the tourist (me). I found this a little awkward but secretly admired the other man for stepping up to it. He was a big fellow from Gorky – a place on the river we’d reach the next day. As Radik shrank away I moved over to talk with my defender, Sasha (Alexander). He was very kind and patient. I’d also met another smaller Sasha, who I had noticed staring at me piercingly while we had waited to board this morning. Initially suspicious of his intense gaze he turned out to be a genuine friend and he and his offsider, a quieter unspoken chap, helped me at a few key points through out the day. Talking with big Sasha I learnt that the crops were potatoes which had a very quick growing period. It continued to be difficult for me to imagine this landscape in freezing sub zero temperatures. With the river freezing over transport actually became less problematic in the long winters as the rivers became ice highways and the land between, now full of summer marshes, bogs and lakes became trafficable by snow-mobiles and the like. Before the onset of winter the river port vessel in Salekhard was towed slowly over five days south to its winter station while the Artic and sub-Arctic rivers froze over. Big Sasha bought me a beer (called Кулер, which is ‘Cooler’ just written in Cyrillic – there’s a lot of this in Russia – English words simply written in Cyrillic) and I returned the favour later, which Radik happened to notice. When I offered to buy him one he waved me off dismissively. He was now hanging out with a young slip of an indigenous woman in her late twenties and seemingly by default a young indigenous boy-man who I thought was the woman’s tag-along brother. It seemed like Radik and her had already been romantically involved or they’d just met, because Radik was all over her and she didn’t seem to mind. The young boy-man was 21 years old with a boyish fuzz over his face and on his upper lip a dark nicotine stain was clearly visible. He was very thin but stood like a sumo wrestler and had the gait of someone trying to appear bigger than he was. His tough guy demeanour was mostly humorous but I learnt of his dangerous side when I asked him what the very obvious indented scar on the back of his head was. It was fresh with scabs still in it and there was hair missing all through it. He shrugged and indicated it was from a fight. With a pretend drinking motion I asked if it was whilst in a drunken state. Everyone around seemed to think so. Anyway, I later learnt that he was just friends with the indigenous woman. He, like Radik started to become a bit annoying too, borrowing my binoculars and handing them freely onto others without asking my permission. I didn’t mind though. There was a feeling on the boat of people looking out for one another. He got a bit too close at times and at one point in his slightly intoxicated state (Note: there’s a lot of constant public drinking in Russia) he fell toward me as the boat took a turn and burnt my upper shoulder and shirt with his lit cigarette tip! The Ob is massive in these lower arctic and sub-arctic reaches. But hard to see it all from the sea level, as it’s braided and multi-branched. The river water column is turbid and full of interlacing plumes of variously brown suspended and dissolved sediments. This continues to be the case all the way up river and I surmise that it’s a mix of perhaps natural and human-induced erosion. After drinking the couple of beers with big Sasha I grabbed the mini guitar and despite it being noisy from the wind and engine sounds on the observation cockpit I sang loud and we had some laughs with the small crowd gathered there. The mechanics pushed through occasionally, opening one door to enter the observation cockpit an exiting through another. Their faces spoke of the continued unsuccessful attempts to fix the motors. The hydrofoil continued with its broken back and we proceeded at less than half pace arriving into rivertown Moozshi (Мужи) at around 20:00 on a hot sunny Saturday evening to await 2.5 hrs for a replacement hydrofoil to come take us to today’s destination of Berozova. Big mozzies and green-eyed horse flies abound in Мужи. Despite the sub-Arctic location it’s hot and hazy. Radik insists I follow him and his girlfriend as we spend time ashore at this languishing riverside town. Despite my desire not to spend time with him I’m intrigued by his character and I find his slip of a girlfriend entertaining. He strips down and takes a dip in the muddy waters of the Ob by the filthy shores. I hand them my mosquito repellent. Pointing at his girlfriend Radik explains that she’s someone he ‘spends time with’ when in these parts away from home and his wife. I wasn’t surprised. She just smiled and pushed him affectionately. Barges of all shapes and sizes are rammed up the muddy banks and to walk them requires stepping over taut steel cable mooring lines. Families sit about on barge decks. Men and boys fish from the jetty or sit on the hauled up boats talking. Occasionally men take off in outboard engine dinghies while others arrive from river parts unknown. The water drifts by with a thick film of oil on the top. As the fish break the surface to snatch the horse flies that the boys catch off each others bodies from the jetty above and toss down, the oil film changes shape and new coloured patterns form. Having been to the shop at the top of the hill, now with big Sasha, to get cold beer and food we returned to the river port jetty. The banks between the footpaths were covered in the lush summer growth of what looked like weeds to me. On the river port jetty I played some more songs as the sun continued low in the sky, never at all looking like it would set. I attracted a sizeable audience and apart from the horse flies and mosquitoes I was a truly enjoying the evening. Sasha and I drank a couple of more beers on the jetty and when the new hydrofoil arrived at 22:30 there was a festive feeling amidst the passengers. The new boat would take us further up river to our scheduled overnight stop at Berozova where we arrived at 01:30 instead of our scheduled 18:00 arrival time. The sun did set eventually for an hour or so. Never far below the horizon the sunset went on for hours before, during and after. And the views from the observation cockpit were incredible. I spent at least an hour just photographing and watching the colours reflected in the river’s meandering channels and through the sparse taiga, which was slowly increasing in size as we coursed the Ob River southwards. Being in the cool of the ‘night’, fog hung low over the grassland depressions and marshes between the taiga. And together with the clouds and colours, an errie atmosphere was created between the trunks of the taiga and the floating plumes and canopies of white mist. At Berosova we were forced off the boat and had to wait the five hours in the floating waiting room by the river’s edge until 06:45. I slept on floor in the space between two back to back rows of chairs. Very uncomfortable but I was exhausted from the previous days’ activities. Being a Saturday night / Sunday morning in Berozova, local revellers were parked at the river’s edge and still partying with their car stereos on loud. Like many of the river towns in the sub-Arctic reaches of the Ob there is no road or rail into Berozova, just the river boat or planes. At six o’clock Radik’s annoying voice woke me up. He was trying to drag me out from under the chairs where I’d crawled during the night. Chris! Chris! was his unending refrain. I was half thankful that he was looking out for me. His pretext was that he didn’t want me to miss the boat. But there was no chance as everyone in the crowded waiting room was waiting for the same boat and I wouldn’t have slept through that racquet. As he tried to push me in front of him to go first when boarding I hung back and gave him a friendly push instead. I then thought I’d better not push my luck with him. Once on the new hydrofoil and zooming at high speed I got some sleep sitting up in the seat despite the hot and sweaty effect of the rear’s sun-room effect and the buzz of a full ship with people sitting amidst motley collections of luggage and talking or listening to loud Russian gangster rap on headphones. This is the second leg – the all-day trip to Khanty-Mansiysk, capital of the autonomous district of the same name. All good except for a bit of a hangover from yesterday’s shena****ns with Radik and friends! All very interesting views and river culture insights with indigenous Khanty and Arctic peoples travelling on board. More frequent now are the river-side villages. Many are only accessed by boat. And along the banks the taiga, now tall enough to be called a forest, was literally falling into the river itself. The hills on the eastern margins, where the Ob’s giant fluvial mechanics were at their greatest potential, were cut through exposing large white sands that stood like unstable eroding cliffs. The beech and pines at the edges were falling down. Campers and picnickers could be seen on the isolated banks, their outboard dinghies and pleasure craft parked up the muddy banks. The hydrofoil zooming by would respond to their waves with a resounding blast from its fog horn. And during the mid-afternoon we passed the point where the giant Western Siberian gas pipelines crossed under the Ob River. I counted at least eight separate pipeline crossings. The crossings showed no signs of the pipes themselves. Just manicured grassy verges and lawns running from between the taiga above to the waters edge. The pipes were buried under here and I assume they were tunnelled beneath the Ob’s bed. They supply all of Europe. I started to get a sense of the magnitude of the resource that was being mined in Siberia. And I had only travelled to just a couple of the resource extraction sites. Mid afternoon we arrived at the floating pontoon for the village of Gorky where big Sasha got off. Next at Priobye little Sasha and his mate were getting off. In town stretching my legs for a moment I found Radik and his mates eating. One last time he insisted I do what he says. This time I obliged as it was a glass of much needed water. In the bright sun of the afternoon I spent most time up on the observation cockpit. My energy was waning. Wind in my hair wasn’t enough to keep me awake and at times I felt like the handicapped one on the River Ob.

Salekhard, Russia

The Triffid’s ‘Wide Open Road’ could easily be my soundtrack here in Salekhard (Салех&#1 072;рд) right on the Arctic Circle. The land is very flat and covered in the taiga-tundra and the River Ob, which drains all of Western Siberia, meanders through this to its delta at the Ob Gulf. I flew along the Arctic Circle this morning from Novy Urengoy to Salekhard and saw the thousands of lakes and marshes. With the flatness come meanders and with meanders come ox-bow lakes. I saw the Ob Gulf from the plane and the flat expanse around it. The Yamal Peninsular stretched flat and enormous to the north.

Upon arrival in the small Bombardier jet, I was detained by the airport police and their registration process. While he was copying my passport I went for an urgent toilet stop. Because my baggage was doing laps on the conveyor belt and I was nowhere in sight I assume that the airport policeman must have thought I’d gone walkabout. With his all-access key he opened the toilet door on me, which gave me a bit of a shock. He closed it before I could see who it was but I assume it was him. When I got to the baggage collection room he was standing guard by the locked door allowing me access to get my backpack and return my passport and immigration card intact.

I got a taxi to town and thought it best to head straight to river port to see what the options were. I’d found out at airport that there were no seats to Tobolsk until 24 July and none to Novosibirsk until 7 July. I was starting to feel anxious about getting out of the Arctic on time to complete my trip!

At the river port floating office and hotel it was a bit busy with a fast boat about to leave south up river. I waited for a white in the long queue and when I got to the ticket office window the young woman said she spoke a little English. But my questions were too complex for her and so she asked me to wait half an hour until the disembarkation of the incoming boat was over. During this time I continued to notice the prevalence of Inuit-type people in the crowds, which I’d first seen at the airport. High cheek bones and and darker reddish skin.

The ticket office woman took me upstairs to the river boat managers, a couple of boy men from Novosibirsk with some English. With the aid of a big map on the wall I was able to ascertain that the neighbouring boat service (their competition) was slow, took five days to Tobolsk and didn’t leave till the day after next. Whereas I could get to Khanty-Mansiysk (Ханты-&# 1052;анси&#1081 ;ск) in two days and take a bus from there to Tobolsk, which was a 7 hour bus ride. I opted for the latter. The two day boat ride was priced at 2618 rubles.

This floating ticket office / waiting room was also a hotel. And so for an extra 800 rubles I got a place to stay without having to go any further.

I went for a walk into town in the mid afternoon and got attacked by the biggest and most ferocious mosquitoes I’ve ever seen!

A man and a woman came up to me asking for money oblivious that I didn’t understand what they were saying. And later a drunk guy approached for the same reasons. I declined their requests.

Part of the town of Salekhard was located on a large rise above the river flats, with good views east. To the west were the Urals way off in the distance – a series of massive ranges in the haze on the horizon.

On this rise above the tributary where the river port was there was a huge wooden church undergoing restoration. Made with he same log cabin construction techniques I found a way in and ended up talking to the crew working n the scaffolding who were all from Armenia. One was eyeing off my possessions around my neck and belt. And at one point asked to use my phone I think. I just feigned I couldn’t understand Russian, which was mostly true all the time. They were interested in my salary and status. They were here because there was little work in Armenia for them. There are many such itinerant workers from the central Asian states and former soviet states. After a while the fellow eyeing off my things made me increasingly nervous and I felt that being inside the forted church grounds with no one else around was too risky, so I said goodbye and left.

I chanced upon a public beach at the base of the rise below the apartment blocks on the edge of the Ob’s braided streams and back lagoons facing the flats. A strange site. It had all the trappings of a regular beach except this was still a way from the ocean of the Ob Gulf and was on the Arctic Circle. Very surreal! And the heat made me even more confused by my surroundings.

I had some shashlyk (pretty much all that I can find on the street) and a beer and watched the Arctic beach goers. I walked back across the beach through the overloaded rubbish bins and past the rank port a loos not emptied for weeks. I had to be back at floating hotel by 22:00 as they told me the gates lock then. I walked back through the towering apartment blocks. So many we ones were going up. There really must be a Siberian gas boom. Sounds like Western Australia. I stopped to get some food for he boat ride and then some cash out but the machine wouldn’t let me take 10,000 rubles in one go. I tried a few times. Finally I worked out how to do it – in two lots but with added Bendigo Bank fees I thought.

The shy young boy managing the floating hotel let me in no worries. The front gate to the ship yard was locked but there was a gap through. I did my washing, drank a beer and felt the rocking of the boat when ever a large vessel steamed by. The shower and tap water was brown river water. And from what I could see of the Ob it had a long history to tell draining as it does from the temperate south to the arctic north across all of Western Siberia.