Upon landing at the airport of Yelizovo in Kamchatka, on that sunny morning of June, I was perfectly aware that I was just about to set foot on a unique, magical, strange land. The prospect of visiting Kamchatka had always been filling my soul with elation when it came to adventurous daydreaming. Look at the world map… What’s the most distant, marginal place you can get to? To me, that has always been Kamchatka. Thus, exiting that plane, I felt like I just had made it to the end of the world.
Kamchatka is a 1,250-km-long peninsula in northeastern Russia: halfway between Alaska and Japan. It occupies an area of 270,000 square-km (roughly equal to the United Kingdom and the Netherlands put together) and has a population of 322,000 people (about 1/43 of London). It is wild land. It is estimated that the first humans settled in Kamchatka no more than a millennium ago. They formed a number of different small tribes living either nomadically in the hinterland or in small permanent fishing villages on the coast.
After the Russians first discovered Kamchatka, they began a very slow process of establishing settlements, assimilating the local populations, and incorporating the peninsula in the Russian Empire. During the Soviet era, the area was declared a military zone and all access to non-military personnel was outright forbidden.
Today, anyone can freely go to Kamchatka, but due to its remoteness, very few people ever do. The covered by vast expanses of tundra, ever-white mountain ranges and towering volcanoes pristine land is still mostly left to bears and other proud, unrestricted wild animals.
All in awe I remained, marveling at my new majestic environs as soon as I exited that plane. It was a brilliant morning. The snowcapped summits of the Koryaksky and Avachinsky volcanoes were gleaming blindingly amidst the blue sky, supervising as proudly as ever throughout the whole of the relentless eternity the well-sheltered bay of Avacha whereby the airport and the only two cities to be found in Kamchatka.
The contiguous cities of Petropavlovsk and Yelizo form a peculiar kind of city. You could regard them as one city as much as you could regard every particular district of each as a part of a city and not as a village. Everything was too sparse. The ‘metropolitan area’ is basically a loose aggregation of small Khrushchyovkas (grey and grim concrete Soviet apartment blocks) and wooden huts along a 40-km long road and its few bystreets.
Occasionally you also see a few public buildings, like churches and shops. The latter is most often tricky to find because the store signs on the building walls do not hint in which out of all the apartments the store is to be found.
People in the streets are a generally rare sight. An even rarer sight is a number of people greater than 20 within an area smaller than a mile square. Such a phenomenon you see only on one of those small Soviet buses running up and down the main road, or at one of the finger-countable cafes and restaurants of the city: I’m recalling having seen two of them. Whenever any number of people greater than 1 come together, they give the impression that they never speak to each other without a good reason; and apparently, they do not often have such a reason. A city-life lover living there would soon become a frequent visitor of the psychiatric booth at the pharmacy. There wasn’t much to do over there.
My original plan was to stay for a couple of days in the city and move on to Kurile Lake by helicopter. The weather had, though, a different opinion. Starting with the second day, that one part of the lower atmosphere over Kamchatka remained occupied by a dark, thick, dismal fog for over a week in a row, not allowing for any flights. This fog was still in place when, a week later, we left to Kurile over land, after all. During that week, now, despite the place seeming terrifically boring at the first glance, we had quite an interesting time. We were, most importantly, very fortunate to be in the company of some amazingly nice and kind locals, together with whom we got to drive around a good deal and see some really cool spots in Kamchatka’s two cities and their surroundings.
Petropavlovsk
Petropavlovsk Kamchatsky is the administrative, industrial, and cultural center of Kamchatka Krai. About 2/3 of Kamchatka’s entire population reside there. I, too, resided there during my first three days in Kamchatka; and kept coming often after I moved to Yelizovo. Most of the city is a cluster of loosely joined residential areas with a few shops here and there. The distances between everything are too great to make walking a good means to explore the city.
Pretty much the only area of interest is the city center. The very heart of the city is (whose else?) Lenin Square. That’s probably the only place in the city where at least a small number of people will be present at any given moment in the daytime. A few benches and a huge statue of Lenin are the only things standing on the square. To the north of the square lies Kultuchnoye Lake. A few more monuments of saints and heroes are erected along its shore.
To the east from the square, there lies the beach of Petropavlovsk. That was my favorite part of the city. It’s not the kind of beach you’ll go to sunbathe and swim – I didn’t see anyone swimming in fact – although I assume some psychos will do every now and then – it’s an ideal place to either sit in quiet contemplation and wonder at the magnificent views across the bay, or take the nice walk along the shore down to the tip of the promontory. A couple of canteens are also located by the beach. One of them also has outdoor tables: the only place I found in the city where you can sit outside and enjoy a cup of coffee or a beer.
Above the beach is Nikolskaya Hill. The trail running along the ridge of the elongated hill makes for a very pleasant stroll. The view of Avacha Bay and the city are breathtaking and the serenity profound. A kind of a small paved square atop the hill was also under construction during my visit there.
Behind the hill, there lies Petropavlovskaya Guba: a small bay hosting the city’s port and shipyard. I assume that’s far from a common tourist attraction, but I found it a very picturesque part of the city. There is something romantic about that air of wistful decay that’s prevalent over the area’s muddy roads, rusted ships, and marred buildings.
Right above the city center soars Petrovskaya Hill. One of the best viewpoints in the city, accessible either by car or cablecar, is to be found up there.
Between these two hills is situated the most lively (still far from being objectively lively) part of the city. Almost all of the city’s few hotels, cafes, and museums are to be found in this area. One day, we attempted to visit the Museum of Military History, but we found it closed in spite of going there at a normal hour on a weekday.
In a demonstration of strange coincidence, however, shortly after we left the museum disappointed, we got to meet the military history alive. That was one of the most memorable encounters I ran into while in Kamchatka. As we walked down a street, an old man sitting on a ledge drew my attention. I became curious about the scads of medals he had pinned on his shirt. I couldn’t but stop and inquire about their origin. He was a century-old World-War-II veteran; one of the few remaining worldwide. He was about to attend a veteran gathering that was to take place somewhere nearby, and that’s why he got himself decorated with the entirety of his distinctions. My inquiring about his honors made him patently very happy, and he demonstrated his happiness with a lengthy and nostalgic verbalization of his youth’s intriguing stories.
Yelizovo
The town of Yelizovo is located northwest of Petropavlovsk. A bus ride between the two takes about 40 minutes. That’s where I resided for most of the time I spent in ‘civilized Kamchatka’. Kamchatka’s commercial airport and heliport, plus most of the offices of the natural parks’ authorities are located there, thus it makes for a good base for one to use to explore Kamchatka.
Other than that, it’s just a simple little town with no special experiences to offer to the visitor. A couple of small parks and cafes and the indispensable to every human settlement in Russia statue of Lenin are the only things of relative interest to be found in Yelizovo’s center. That one statue of the bear mother and cub bearing the ‘Russia starts here’ inscription is also located on the airport ring road outside of Yelizovo. There is nothing particularly spectacular about it, but for some reason, it is considered one of Kamchatka’s most renown landmarks.
Termalnyy Springs
Living in Kamchatka’s Petropavlovsk-Yelizovo city and having no car, one would run the serious danger of committing suicide due to extreme boredom. Luckily, in my case, I got to drive a good deal around with local friends and see some of the epical beauty enveloping that odd city.
Bathing in natural hot springs is one of the locals’ favorite recreational activities. On my first day in Kamchatka already, we drove with my friend Valentina from Petropavlovsk to the Termalnyy Springs, situated some 40 km south from Yelizovo, near Vilyuchinsk town. As I later found out, most of the hot springs found within a certain range from the city are developed and commercially exploited.
Termalnyy Springs is one of them. The seething water gushing out from the Earth’s guts is trapped within a walled artificial pool, accessible only after purchasing a ticket. It was far from the quixotic bathing one usually imagines when hearing of volcanic hot springs – it felt no much different than an ordinary heated swimming pool – but it nevertheless was a good place to spend a delightful afternoon; and Termalnyy village was quite pretty, too.
Malky Springs
One of those springs left to their natural state I got to visit during my stay in Yelizovo were the Malky Springs. They are located by Klyuchevka River, some 60 km west of Yelizovo. You still have to pay an entrance fee, and there are plenty of holiday cottages around the area, but the hot pools are left untouched. It is a wondrous, alien landscape you behold once you come to that place. Several smaller and larger, bubbling and steaming pools are formed beside the riverbank, below the view of ever-white mountain tops. One can move back and forth between the hot pools and the river’s freezing waters, which makes for a very exhilarating experience of alternating adrenaline boost and sedative relief episodes. The moving between the waters must be compulsorily done very quickly, as armies of gigantic, blood-thirsty mosquitos will cause episodes of extremely torturing itching to anyone they find undressed out of the water.
Khalaktirskiy Beach
Khalaktirskiy Beach was the most amazingly beautiful place I got to visit in the vicinity of Petropavlovsk-Yelizovo. It is a many-miles-long, black-sanded beach, neighbored by a vast extent of desolate tundra interspersed with tall, outlandish rock formations. It’s been recently becoming a popular destination amongst Russian surfers, who gather there to ride the waves of the North Pacific dressed in thermal suits. Other than them, I assume that very rarely do people swim there.
Seeing this so charming and enticing aquatic mass, myself, I couldn’t resist having a dip (remember? one of those psychos we talked about before…). I didn’t really manage to swim as much as I would have liked to: it took no more than 10 secs from the time I submerged into the water for my chest to become utterly numb, whereupon the air running through my lungs caused to me no more sensation than air running through a bellows. It was freezing as crazy but very reinvigorating.
Afterwards, we got to drive a little around the muddy tracks of the area and climb to the top of one of those rocks scattered along the beach. The view of the boundless Pacific Ocean and the eyereach-exceeding black beach and tundra was one of the most unique views I’ve got to behold at in my whole life.
