A whole week passed waiting for the sun to shine over the peninsula of Kamchatka in the Russian Far East. Day in day out, the sky was choked by a thick mass of grey clouds, not allowing for the helicopter we’ve been so eagerly waiting to take us to Kurile Lake on the southernmost tip of Kamchatka to fly. After all, on yet another gloomy morning, we joined together with a group of nice folks at the headquarters of the Kurile Lake Reserve in Elizovo, bound to undertake the trip over land. It was a long, exhausting, fascinating trip.
We stacked the backpacks and all the rest of the stuff up as steadily as possible in the back of that off-road lorry on which we were to undertake the trip. Then, seven people, we also jumped in and somehow fitted on the two narrow benches on either side. The way we ended up squeezedly crammed with each other and the luggage reminded me of transportation in Africa – only the goats and chickens were missing. All was ready. We set off at 8:30 am.
We took the road leading west from Elizovo. It was not a road in the full sense imagined by the average person of the modern era developed world, but it was still mostly asphalted and the areal sum of its level surface counted to more than the total area of the potholes. We made a stop for some pies and a cup of tea, and a couple of more cigarette breaks, and some 200 km later we reached the end of the road on Kamchatka’s west coast. There started the hardest and most picturesque part of the trip.
We drove on a dirt road along a narrow, straight strip of land between the Protoka River estuary and the Sea of Okhotsk. There was something reminiscent of a town along the way: a perfect representation of Soviet decadence. I kept gazing out of the window during the entire way: the distant, grey oceanic horizon; and the putrefied wooden and rusted metallic shipwrecks, and the rotting whale carcasses scattered across the wide, black-sanded beach.
A little before the end of the land strip, we came to a halt beside the estuary shore. There was a floating platform attached to a motorized boat moored on the opposite bank, responsible for carrying across the sparse passing-by traffic. The vessel’s operator was apparently dozing off and took him a while to proceed towards our part.
On the other side, signs of civilization became really scarce. Our truck kept moving slowly but steadily, bumping up and down on the rough, muddy track. Inside the cabin, we were at times bouncing up to half a meter off the bench, marginally saving our heads from hitting the ceiling. Objects were flying freely across the cabin’s dimensions, and yolk of broken eggs was dribbling down from various surfaces. All around, vast expanses of tundra with no one but solitary bears roaming through them.
Then our course got interrupted again by a water mass. We reached the point where Golygino and Opala rivers meet with each other shortly before they jointly pour into the ocean. While waiting for the small ro-ro, we got to see a few seals sluggishly swimming down the stream, at times raising their heads above the surface to briefly examine the atmospheric world and marvel at its complex beauty, and then diving again in the obscurity of their aquatic netherworld.
We boarded and started floating downstream the Opala River, at first, and upstreams the Golygino thereafter. In the meanwhile, we got to wonder at a couple of large seal colonies established on the skerries by the rivers’ estuary. That was the first time I was seeing seals in the wild and I was seeing them in the hundreds. Most of them must have been done with the day’s foraging and were lazily lying on the rocks, doing nothing but being aware of their existence. Still many were gliding about around the islets. Large numbers of eagle-sized gulls shared the same habitats with the seals and were flying around, occasionally piercing the air with their screeches.
We debarked on the other side and continued on our way. One more river crossing and many miles of rough drive through the immense tundra later, we reached Ozornaya River. We didn’t cross this one but left the coast and drove east into the hinterland along with the river. Some 30 more km was all we could drive.
We unloaded all our stuff from the lorry and got to wait by the riverbank. It was dusk by then. The smoothly flowing surface of the river was darkening tint after tint. Eventually, in slight contrast with the river surface, the silhouette of a boat appeared from the curve ahead, effortlessly advancing downstream towards our part. We quickly cluttered up the small vessel with all the luggage. It turned around and started on its toilsome way back to the lake against the current.
Our way was to be more toilsome. It was already as dark as it can get. We took our torches out and started munching the 15 remaining km to the shore of Kurile Lake. It was a long but profoundly pleasant way. The silhouettes of the tall mountains and volcanoes all around were still distinct from the sky. The sky, given the area’s extreme remoteness from civilization, was flooded with countless clusters of bright stars. Every so often, a bear or another appeared within the reach of our torches, meeting our boisterous marching with alarmed fleeing.
It was well past midnight when we finally made it to Ozornzya Ranger Station on the west shore of Kurile Lake: one of the most ecologically unique places on the planet: where we were bound to spend the next month to come isolated from civilization.
