White Sun of the Desert

Okay, my jaw is better now and I can resume normal service.  Sorry for keeping you waiting.

Anyway, firstly to the UAE…

That was a nice little trip, my first to the place since I left a-Sakhalin bound in September 2006.  Many things had changed, but many things had also stayed the same.  We arrived into a new terminal, under construction when I left.  Huge, white pillars and white marble floors gave the impression you’d entered some Greek temple rather than an airport terminal.  But such misconceptions were soon righted once you saw the impressive bank of twenty or thirty immigration counters of which only four were open, manned by slovenly youths in national dress more interested in talking to each other than processing passports, with large queues of Indians clutching fistfuls of paperwork leaving little doubt you were trying to enter Dubai.  Like I said, many things had stayed the same.

As had the drive from the airport as far as the creek.  Not much has changed there at all, and most of the development has taken place in the south of the city, leaving Deira and Bur Dubai pretty much how it was.  The first major change I saw was that the Garhoud Bridge – for years operating largely as a car park – had been upgraded to one with four lanes running in each direction and we whizzed across it in seconds.  As we went further towards Sheikh Zayed Road I could start to see the results of the enormous construction projects that were underway during my time there: a forest of new buildings along the road itself, an enormous shopping mall and residential development, and of course, the Deathspire, the tallest building in the world, more commonly known as the Burj Khalifa (named after the ruler of Abu Dhabi’s wallet).  But that wasn’t what made my jaw drop; contrary to what I was expecting, I did not see an enormous difference between the buildings of Dubai then and now, probably because most of it was well under construction even then which rendered the difference merely one of finishing and colour.  What did amaze me was the lack of traffic.  I went from the airport to the residences under the Deathspire in less than 20 minutes, and the roads just didn’t seem to have any cars on them.  Back in 2006 I’d have endured an hour of bumper-to-bumper misery.  I asked my taxi driver, who had been in Dubai for 32 years, what had caused the improvements.  The answer was several things: much better roads, a lot of people leaving, toll charging on certain routes, a new metro system, and speed cameras preventing people doing the idiotic, breakneck speeds which inhibited the formation of consistent, flowing traffic.  Indeed, the roads had improved a lot.  I’m glad I wasn’t there during the chaos of their construction, but a few of the worst roundabouts I remember had been replaced with mini, and sometimes not so mini, spaghetti junctions.  Sadly, it was obvious that most of the transport routes had been thrown into the plan as an afterthought, rather than the buildings positioned to suit.  The metro – which I didn’t ride but it looked pretty neat – threaded it’s way around, under, and over various flyovers and other structures like a snake trying to work its way through an obstacle course, testament to its inclusion coming late in the planning stage of the new Dubai, assuming there ever was a planning stage. (more…)

I’ve now been living in our new apartment in Patong, on the Thai island of Phuket, for two weeks and I think it is high time I showed my readers what it looks like.

As usual with things like this – or maybe it’s just with me – there is a tale to be told.  This is how we bought the apartment.

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The weather in Sakhalin is warming up nicely, the evenings are still getting longer, the bears are hungry and out in force…which means only one thing: camping season.

Camping in Sakhalin is worthwhile for several reasons.  Firstly, there is the scenery…

…which, if you choose the right spot, can include the sight of early salmon leaping a waterfall.  I never saw this when I camped as an army cadet in the Brecon Beacons.

Secondly, camping in Sakhalin involves driving 4WDs laden down with copius amounts of “kit” which is to be shown off shamelessly to your male companions.  Americans are welcome as they have a habit of bringing along eye-boggling amounts of kit purchased from the USA for a fraction of what it would cost you in Sakhalin, assuming you could even buy it here.  Hi-tec electronic gadgetry from Japan is also popular, at least with the blokes.  Upon arrival at the campsite, all kit is dragged from the cars, unpacked, and assembled willy-nilly around a huge fire which consumes a small forest worth of logs throughout the night.

Thirdly, camping in Sakhalin is forbidden unless all involved (Egyptians excluded) get totally hammered on beer, vodka, coffee mixed with Baileys and Glava, all three in succession, or anything else you fancy.  The drinking is interrupted for half an hour or so whilst everyone gathers around the barbecue and throws on pile after pile of meat, most of which goes uneaten because the Russian Army never showed up to eat its portion.  With everyone fed, the drinking continues and the singing begins.  Usually somebody talentless and tuneless gets out a guitar and does a fine job of keeping the bears at bay.  Once a suitable late hour has been reached, fetching firewood involves going more than a hundred metres into dark forest, and everyone is plastered, those brave souls with tents crawl (or in the case of the Americans, stroll and head for the east wing) into their nylon pods and fall into a drunken coma.  Those who lack a tent or are too chicken to use it cheat their way through the camping experience by sleeping in the back of their Toyotas.  Next time I’m gonna be leaving tin openers with pots of honey around the campsite.

Finally, camping in Sakhalin, like most seemingly mundane activities in Russia, often presents bizarre spectacles which would go sadly unseen were we to sit in dingy bars, crumbling apartments, or remain in the UK.  On our last camping trip a car inexplicably burst into flames on the opposite side of the valley, producing a column of thick smoke.  The bewildered occupants would normally have been rueing the loss of their car and contemplating how to get home again…   

…had their blazing chariot not set fire to the entire hillside, causing the driver and his passenger to attempt to stamp out the flames with their sneaker-clad feet.  As the picture below shows, they were not successful.  This made for a fine afternoon’s entertainment for those, i.e. us, watching from a comfortable distance.

But the fun wasn’t yet over!  Just as we were packing up to leave, for no apparent reason a minibus owned and operated by a Korean seaweed harvester opted to drive across a river rather than simply take the road, and unsurprisingly got stuck.  For our entertainment he rammed the opposite bank a few times without success, before his mate turned up in a jeep to winch him out.

All in all, a fine weekend camping in Sakhalin.  May those to come be as entertaining and bear-free.

I’m now back in Sakhalin, a mere 90km from Japan at the closest point, but one might as well be on the moon and the other on Saturn as far as proximity has resulted in similarity.

I went to Japan with an Australian, German, and a Brit who were all experienced snowboarders intent on doing off-piste powder boarding whilst trying to avoid being buried in an avalanche. For my part, I was intent on learning how to ski whilst trying to avoid breaking any limbs or looking like a complete twit. With the exception of that last one, it was a successful trip for all of us.

Regular readers will remember that I had been to Japan last July for a visa run, and thought pretty highly of it, and so I had high expectations of this trip. I wasn’t disappointed. As soon as we got off the aeroplane at Narita airport, one of my friends pointed out that Japan always seems overstaffed: everywhere you look, there are people in impeccable uniforms – always uniforms – standing about helping you out. Even the customs official with dazzling white gloves checking your bags for contraband has the manner of a tour guide. More uniformed people help you towards an enormous door maked “Exit” which opens on its own anyway. Contrast this with Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk where exiting the airport from the baggage area takes you through a set of double doors each no more than two feet wide, one of which is always locked shut, which open inwards into the crowd of people trying to pass through, after which you go down a flight of twelve concrete steps. Who the hell designs an airport entrance which involves a flight of steps?

The overstaffed comment stuck with me. On our first day in Tokyo we witnessed six beaming uniforms blocking the pavement while a car reversed out from a building, just an ordinary office block. Later, when it had started raining, each man pulled on an identical set of white wellies and a transparent raincoat. In Niseko, watching a front-end loader clearing huge piles of snow on a public road was a flagman in blue livery with a white helmet, a whistle, and a flashing baton who signalled for the driver to stop every time a pedestrian walked nearby, nodding and smiling at anyone who walked past. Roadworks in Japan are accompanied by a whole load of regularly arranged flashing cones and a workforce which looks as though they are interested in getting the job done and minimising inconvenience to traffic, one of whom is a flagman decked out in a white helmet and reflective clothing who actually watches the traffic. The road crews in Sakhalin look like escaped prisoners and the flagman loses interest to the point that he idly waves you through into the path of a speeding Isuzu lorry coming the other way. What struck me about the work ethic in Japan – and I am prepared to believe this is only appearances which belie a different reality – was that even those doing what would normally be classed as menial jobs seemed to be carried out with professionalism and dedication without the stigma which accompanies such work in the west. There are thousands of middle-aged or even elderly men doing menial work in Japan who seem more enthusiastic and take more pride in their work than people in middle management in the UK. Clearly this is a cultural thing whereby any work is viewed as more noble than doing nothing, even if the work is menial; and if a job needs doing, even a menial job, then it should be carried out to perfection. It struck me as a form of welfare. Rather than taking the UK approach of paying a couple of million able-bodied people to sit about doing nothing whilst countless menial tasks go undone, the Japanese culture allows people to carry out useful (if not strictly necessary) tasks without the stigma associated with doing a rubbish job. In terms of appearance, a visitor to Japan comes away amazed at how clean and orderly the place is and how professional the people are. A visitor to the UK comes away wondering why the nation which conquered the developing world is so eager to adopt its appearance.

Tokyo was a lot of fun. Having arrived in Narita and got ourselves on the super-comfortable bus with loads of baggage space and unbelievably helpful driver (who loaded our bags for us) which took us to our hotel followed by the obligatory arrival beer or three, we headed off to some acting school where we learned to samurai sword fight for 3 hours. We were (thankfully) only using wooden swords, and the beers beforehand were not a good idea, and the instructors couldn’t really speak English, and the little Japanese instructor looked more than capable of chopping us in half with a sword while sipping tea on a veranda, but it was heaps of fun and even though we are probably not going to be called upon to work as samurai warriors any time soon, we did manage to pull off some semi-cool looking moves (accompanied by the obligatory “Japanese” war cry gleaned from war movies) and even took part in a role play where we kill one of the instructors. This was an acting school after all.

A Samurai warrior defeats a brigand

The Samurai warrior turns on the brigand’s camera crew

Nothing is more natural to a visitor in Tokyo who has had 3 hours of samurai sword instruction than going to get ratarsed until the early hours, so as the forces of nature demanded of us, we did that. We headed for the Golden Gai district which is made up of hundreds of tiny bars, some no larger than 2m x 4m, and proceeded from one to another, drinking a beer in each one, adhering to a rule that we must go down any dark, dingy alley we came across.

Listen love, I’ve told you already, I’m engaged, all right?

It was fun, with some of the small bars showing plentiful character which some say Tokyo lacks, although we did find ourselves paying extortionate prices for even a single drink and half the time a cover charge was piled on top. Unsensibly for four expats with over 20 years of overseas experience amongst us, we happily told one barman who, when he was figuring out what to charge us and asked the question, that we had never been here before and had no idea how the system worked. Unsurprisingly we got fleeced.

Anyone know how much this is gonna cost?

Gradually the beer turned into soju (which I always thought was a Korean drink), and then to potato soju foisted on us by a couple of very friendly young Japanese men who we stumbled across in a bar. I was more comfortable on the soju, even if made from potatoes, than endless pitchers of (excellent) Sapporo beer, but our poor German friend is hopeless on spirits (but drinks beer in 5-day sessions) and ended up drunkenly claiming he could moonwalk which the Japanese really, really wanted to witness. They did, we did, we all laughed. We stopped laughing when one of the Japanese pulled out his mobile phone, flipped it open, rotated the screen through 90-degrees to show how he could watch Japanese TV on widescreen anywhere in the country. We showed him how ours could send text messages and take grainy photos, and talked about this thing called fire we discovered last month.

Okay, we’ve met some incredibly drunk westerners. Now what?

I was pretty hammered at this stage and so am somewhat reliant on others’ testimony for what happened, but it seems the Japanese were in two minds whether to go home for some much-needed sleep (they were working the next day, and it was already 1am) or to take us to a Japanese restaurant. They chose the latter, and walked us along what seemed like a quarter of the Tokyo marathon route towards the restaurant. Along the way we were continually harassed by African men trying to entice us into various strip joints with dubious promises of the best girls in Tokyo. This took all of us by complete surprise, and after a while it became seriously annoying as the men were most insistent and would follow us for miles. I pretended I was a Russian who knew no English and they left me alone, but it was still a pain. I’m surprised the Japanese put up with it, I can’t believe many visitors are left with anything but a negative impression after coming into contact with these men, who number in the hundreds. I wonder if they do the job because the Japanese for whatever reason find it difficult to do themselves? Certainly, when we were in Sapporo I noticed the Japanese men trying to flog us similar services were far less animated, almost embarrassed. And thankfully, there appear to be areas where touting for strip clubs is forbidden; walking down one street, the chap following us stopped abruptly as though a line were drawn in the road, and from thereon we could walk in peace.

So we ended up in a restaurant with our two Japanese friends who could not speak much English, which mattered not one jot to us or them, and we sat on the floor with our shoes lying somewhere near the door as beer after beer and plate after plate arrived at our table for the next couple of hours. I have no idea what was said by whom or to whom, but I do remember that when the bill came it was the same price as we’d paid for 4 drinks in the Golden Gai and we had a bit of a hard time trying to get our friends to let us pay for it. We ended up splitting it 50:50 or 60:40 or everyone throwing in random notes until the waiter left satisfied, and we spilled onto the road back-slapping and thanking and went our separate ways sometime around 3am. I forget what the plan was, but we somehow ended up in a minute bar somewhere containing a counter and four stools which was so narrow that when your belly was against the counter your back was six inches from the wall.

Look! We’re the only ones in here!

D’you think he knows we’re not from around here?

The barman was a lively fellow, which was just as well considering the state of his clientele, and kept us plied with drinks and put up with what must have been inane conversation until somewhere near 4am when we fell out onto the road, which could be done by leaning back on your stool, dodged the Cameroonian at the end of the road who promised us women and, erm, more women and took a taxi home. I guess we’ll never know if the barman believed the story from two of our number that they were producers of pornographic movies, but he seemed to as somebody woke up in the morning with a piece of paper with a few phone numbers scrawled on it. Numbers, I hasten to add, that went unrung.

One of these two is a porn king

There’s nothing quite like shopping for electronics in Tokyo, and for a few hours the next day that’s what we did. It’s fun, because you get to look at the stuff we’ll be using in our homes in the west in 10 years time. The cutting edge technology we see in the UK has probably been in Japan since 1986. More importantly, you could find lying on shelves any accessory for Canon cameras which exists. I struggled in vain in Singapore and Manila to find certain accessories for my SLR and video camera, but in the giant electronics store in Tokyo the lady flicked through the catalogue and pulled it off the shelf behind her without wrinkling a brow. We also wandered into a sex shop which suggested that perhaps all is not well in the gloomier corners of Japanese society. Eerie dolls of what looked to be 12 year old schoolgirls, umpteen devices combining latex, gels, and mysterious liquids into which male members can be poked for sexual pleasure, machinery for men and women which made me wonder where they recruit the designers from, and an impressive selection of DVDs through which ran the common theme of the action being slightly, and sometimes not so slightly, forced. Then there were the pornographic comic books which lined shelves in their thousands, many of which depicted various bodily fluids deposited by what must have been a firehose rather than a human being. Very strange indeed, but seemingly no less popular for being so.

One highlight of our two-day adventure in Tokyo was going to the Tokyo Dome City theme park and riding the Thunder Dolphin roller coaster. Tokyo is a big city containing some monster buildings, and it is somewhat disconcerting when hungover to look around you on the steep ascent at the start of the ride to see the whole city spread out aroud you, large towers beneath you, and notice that you are still only three-quarters the way up. If there are any Japanese wondering who those four foreigners were whimpering in the rearmost car during the ascent and blubbering near the top that they’d changed their minds and wanted to get off, it was us. It was a seriously good ride.

We flew from Tokyo Haneda airport to Sapporo on a 1-hour ANA commuter flight, which turned out to be a Boeing 747. With efficiency unrivalled anywhere else in the world the plane was filled from the boarding gate within fifteen minutes flat and emptied at the other end in ten. Even small planes in the UK take half an hour to fill what with dunderheads unable to find their seat and trying to fit 3-foot bags into a 2-foot space. And in Japan they don’t have some archaic system of physically tearing off boarding passes before you board, you simply flash a bar code past a reader and on you go.

Our first three days skiing were spent in the resport of Rusutsu, where I donned my newly purchased skiing gear and found myself an instructor, a 54-year old called Mori who used to be in the Japanese airforce. I asked him when he first learned to ski, but alas he couldn’t remember. His earliest memory was him skiing to school when he was 3 or 4, so it must have been before then. By contrast, I had had a couple of 2-hour ski lessons on Gornii Vozdukh the week before I went where I had mastered the snowplough (provided it wasn’t too steep and I wasn’t expected to turn right). My lesson in how to mount a ski-lift was delivered in the time between the thing whacking my legs and the bar coming down and whacking my head, and my first attempt at dismounting saw me skidding along the floor on my arse and a further two or three minutes to get back up onto my skis, all of which amused my companions somewhat. By the time Mori had finished with me he had me good enough to go down any of the red runs in the resort (which I did the next day), and was making something between parallel turns and a snowplough (more of one than the other depending on which direction I was trying to turn in). My speed down the slope was somewhere between snail and glacial, my body position put my chin between my skis, and my arms flailed like a grain thresher but I was able to get down the slopes without falling over. My friends, whose cruelty knows no bounds, chided me for not making enough effort in falling over and christened me Sonic Boom.

Erm, I found these lying about. Anyone know what they are for?

By the time we got to Niseko for the final five days skiing and I’d taken another couple of hours instruction from an Aussie, I was going a bit faster and able to come down the steeper slopes doing parallel turns, which is about where I wanted to be in terms of skiing by the end of the holiday. Niseko was a nice enough place but ludicrously expensive; for example, we were charged $3 each for some raw cabbage leaves and mustard which was a compulsory purchase when you sit down in one of the bars, so we took an opportunity one night to go to Kutchan, the small town just along the road by bus, where the prices were a third what they were in the ski resort and even though I don’t particularly like sushi I thought this is the place to eat a pile of it if I’m ever going to. So I did, and it was not at all bad. The skiing was a bit hit and miss, largely due to a monster hangover which wrote me off for the first day and the final day saw strong winds close all the lifts and the snow turned into slush. During our stay the place was half empty and many buildings stood unoccupied, perhaps a sign of the economic crisis. If they want to retain the numbers for next year, they’re going to have to examine their prices. Another thing I liked about skiing was that afterwards you could go and get drunk and act like a lout, only it isn’t called getting drunk and acting like a lout. Instead it gets called aprés ski, and is therefore far more sophisticated.

All in all, it was a a great trip and a huge thanks are due to the two Japanese gentlemen who took us out in Tokyo, as well as the dozens of Japanese who helped us out when we were struggling with something or other, from locating the right bus to dismounting a ski-lift.

Before I finish, some public apologies are due to various people. Jan would like to apologise to a certain barmaid for asking in all seriousness whether she was from Niseko or another part of Japan (she was from New Zealand); Nick would like to apologise to whomever has to pay for the serviceable parts of the toilets in the places we stayed; I would like to apologise to my three companions who had to share a chalet with me (they know what for); Mark would like to apologise to the Japanese Department of Health, Sanitation, and the Environment for leaving his ski socks outside and thus being responsible for the extinction of at least two indigenous species; Nick and I would like to apologise to Mark for his being unable to make any move whatsoever on the pretty Japanese girl in Splash bar (those purple wellies would have looked good beside your bed); I feel an apology is necessary to two wonderful young ladies from Queensland whom I mistakenly said lacked class; Jan would like to apologise to his entire nation for being the most untidy, disorganised German ever to have entered a ski chalet; and we would all like to apologise to the next residents of the Ronde Lodge in Niseko who must surely be due some discount.

Finally, I hope the Australian who gave an unprovoked Nazi salute to Jan and Mark when they were wearing their lederhosen gets a damned good kicking, sooner rather than later.

On 7th January it was Christmas according to the Russian Orthodox calendar, there was a soft snow falling from the sky, and people were out celebrating in Lenin Square that evening.  So I wandered down with my camera to take some pictures.

August and September on Sakhalin Island are known by everyone as the season where the salmon swim from the sea up the thousands of rivers and streams all over the island to lay their eggs.

This is a time when huge nets are slung across river-mouths to be lifted by crane and emptied by the ton into lorries, the operators of such activities having either paid huge sums of money for licenses to do so, or paid huge sums of money in bribes to do so.  The first is more common, the second suspected and almost certain to go on, and it is true that fishing inspectors drive up and down in a fancy new Land Cruisers (lending much weight to suspicions of the second scenario) ensuring that nobody takes a fish out of the river without having first paid for it one way or another. 

For those without cranes, the options are to stand by the river and fish in the traditional fashion or get hold of a small dinghy and row out into the river mouth.  Individuals are supposed to purchase a license for 10 fish from the fishing inspector, but I doubt that many of the several hundred Russians you see down by the river have bothered with this.  Most people are catching fish purely for personal consumption.

You’d be hard-pressed to call it fishing.  Salmon swimming upstream to lay eggs aren’t much interested in biting at a lure, but so dense are the fish in the water, holding their position against the current trying to take them back downstream, that is is simple to throw in a large treble-hook and foul hook a large salmon, or if you don’t mind getting your feet wet, you can simply wade in and grab one.  You can even go fishing with a large rock, caveman style.  But it’s not the stuff you’d find many fly fishermen seeking the thrill of a battle with a Scottish salmon to take much interest in.  That said, casting and spinning on the beach can get you a fish which could make you feel some sense of achievement, more so than whacking one on the head with a club as it idles in the shallow water.  The sheer volume of fish is quite incredible, as the pictures below show.  No stream seems too small to attract thousands of salmon, which seem to almost take up more space than the water itself.

Of course, fishing in local waters being prohibited by any employee of the company I work for, I did not attempt to catch any fish using any method, and nor did the group of people I was with.  The two fish that I cooked along with potatos, carrots, and onion in a large pot, and the fish that was roasted on the fire in foil with added lemon, during the last camping trip were purchased legitimately from a local fisherman only after we had obtained explicit confirmation from the fishing inspector that the fisherman concerned was fully paid up and was an altogether wholesome citizen of the Russian Federation.

Any mighty tasty they were too.  The fish, that is.

I am now back in Sakhalin after my trip to Siberia, which was pretty good fun.

The best way to get to Irkutsk from Sakhalin is through the city of Khabarovsk, situated on the Amur river less than 30km from the Chinese border, a 1 hour flight from Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk.  Khabarovsk is somewhat of a regional hub, slightly smaller than Vladivostok, and the nearest decent sized city to Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk.  From here you can fly straight to almost every other major Russian city, and a few foreign ones as well.  The airline Dal’Avia is probably the best option to take for this trip, it being based out of Khabarovsk.  But being the best option in this area of Russia is really not saying very much.

Our aircraft was an ancient old Tu-134 (last one built: 1984), the interior of which was decorated in similar fashion to kitchens you see in old 1960s American films.  Leg room was non-existent, the seats didn’t recline, but inexplicably flopped completely forward instead (assuming there was nobody occupying it of course).  Onboard entertainment consisted of listening to strange engine noises and the clunking and whining of hydraulics.  That said, the service was good, and umpteen times better than the ignorant old hags I encountered when I last flew Lufthansa.  Yes, I’ve mentioned this before, and the more times the better as far as I am concerned.  Anyway, the description of the aircraft was the same for all four legs of my journey there and back.

We had a couple of hours to kill in Khabarovsk, so we took the trolleybus down to the Amur river to take a photo just as the sun had set.

It was severly cold when we stopped to take that picture, with a vicious wind coming off the river.  I took my gloves off for no more than two minutes before my hands ached with the cold.  Khabarovsk itself was a lot smarter than I expected, but it had been a while since I had been to a provincial city on mainland Russia.  The city boasted lots of smart, either new or refurbished buildings, and clearly a lot of money had been spent and was still being spent.  The outskirts towards the airport were as decrepit and tatty as one would expect anywhere in Russia, but much of the city clearly reflected Russia’s newfound wealth.

Getting back to the airport, which wasn’t a bad place by Russian standards, my young colleague Andrei and I thought we had plenty of time for a drink.  No sooner had we ordered a couple of vodkas when we were told to board the bus which takes you across the apron to the plane, so like a pair of alcoholics we had to down them in one go and run for the door.  More amusingly, a chap who we’d seen getting pulled at airport security in Sakhalin for having 3 bottles of cognac in his hand luggage showed up at the bar in Khabarovsk airport and was completely drunk.  Perhaps he’d drunk his cognac rather than handed it to airport security.  He asked the barmaid if they’d serve him hard alcohol, and they said they would, but he probably wouldn’t be allowed on the plane.  So he ordered a beer instead.  A soft drink, in Russia.

The flight from Khabarovsk to Irkutsk was 3 hours and 10 minutes of knee crushing misery which made me appreciate what I had previously considered to be poor leg room on Boeings and Airbuses.  Lufthansa are still crap though.  Did I mention that?  Anyway, we landed in Irkutsk which is probably the crappest airport in Russia, and got ourselves a taxi to the Evropa Hotel, which according to the list we got from the travel agent, was the best in town.  As it turned out, it wasn’t bad at all.  The rooms were of a western standard, although too small to properly accommodate the large, double (or rather, twins pushed together) bed; you had to step over the corner to get around it.  But there was plenty of running water, both hot and cold, and the TV worked and the curtains fit the windows.  Shame you can’t get a hotel in Moscow which does that for the same price of $200 a night, breakfast included.

The next day was free, as the flights could only get us in with a day spare either side of the day on which we had our meeting in Angarsk arranged.  First thing in the morning we had the bright idea of walking a couple of kilometres to the centre of town to try to find an internet cafe.  It was -32C.  As we walked, not daring to stop in case we froze to death, I noticed sparkles in the air in front of me the whole time.  Fearing I was turning into some sort of hairy Tinkerbell or my breakfast had been laced with LSD, I realised it was my breath forming into ice crystals.  I’d never seen that before.  By the time we reached the centre of town, I’d seen enough to realise it wasn’t half as smart as I’d been led to believe, and was not as well maintained or refurbished as Khabarovsk.  My face had also frozen.  We’d not found the internet cafe, and the gormless people we stopped and asked hadn’t a clue where one might be, so we gave up.  Actually, I should quit with the insults: why I didn’t use the internet in the hotel business centre is anyone’s guess.  So we did the only sensible thing and jump in a taxi to go to the excellent bar we’d found the night before, an underground joint on Karl Marx street themed around a German beer hall, complete with sausages on the menu, huge beer steins, and waitresses dressed as Heidi.  It was warm inside.

Later on, much later on, we decided to head out to a nightclub somebody or other had told us about.  It was across the Angar river, then left a bit, then right a bit, and went by the name of Cherdak, meaning ‘attic’.  It was larger, smarter, and a lot cheaper but otherwise identical to the 777 club in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk.  And there were no hookers in Cherdak.  We had a whale of a time in there.  We got friends with a young local man who got hopelessly drunk and introduced us to the DJ, who also got hopelessly drunk.  And we joined them in also getting hopelessly drunk.  My wife tells me she won’t read this blog post, but on the offchance she does, I will say at this point that there were no girls in this club whatsoever.  Yeah, it must have been Siberia’s only gay club.  All men.  Anyway, it was a lot of fun, especially as the place didn’t see many foreigners or even many outsiders, and Andrei and I were somewhat of a novelty.  Nobody spoke any English, except a handful of younger gir men who had learned a bit at school and tried their best to remember it and talk to me.  I was busy babbling Russian for all I was worth.  It seems Siberians like foreigners who can speak Russian.  It also seems Siberians like Brits who can’t dance.

Next day our client had rung us early in the morning to say they couldn’t make the meeting, and postponed it until the next day, which gave us another day to kill.  By this time we’d befriended an Armenian taxi driver who was full of funny stories and drove a lot better than most of Russia’s taxi drivers (we only had one near head-on collision with him in 3 days).  We called him up and he took us the 70km down to Listvyanka, a small village on the shores of Lake Baikal.  I had made it a priority to see Lake Baikal during our visit to Irkutsk, as it is one of those places in Russia which I’d heard was well worth an effort to visit at least once.  When we got there, it was clearly impressive.  Unfortunately, winter is probably not the best time to visit, as most of it it was frozen solid and the tour operators were not working.  There were a handful of Buryat and Russian traders flogging overpriced souvenirs such as objects carved from Baikal jade (such objects included minature and not-so-mintature male genitalia) and furry shaman somethings or other.  And there was a stall selling dried and frozen omul, a fish found only in Lake Baikal.  One burly female Buryat collared Andrei and refused to let him go until he’d bought a promotional CD of a place that I’m not even sure was anywhere near Lake Baikal. 

Here are some pictures.

Obviously, twenty minutes and a few snaps is not nearly sufficient for a visit to such an interesting and impressive place as Lake Baikal.  But we were out of season and we didn’t have much time, and nevertheless I’m glad I have seen it and would love to go back for a few days in summer, when I was told it is horrendously expensive.

The next day we called our Armenian driver and headed out to Angarsk, an industrial town about an hour’s drive up the Angar river from Irkutsk, to meet our potential client.  Angarsk was born in 1948 for the sole purpose of serving the enormous petrochemical complex built there in the early 1950s.  The complex is one of Russia’s largest, and the biggest in Asia, at least according to Wikipedia.  I can well believe it.  From end to end, it measured 20km.  One of the people we met at the main offices showed us the huge, 2m long plans of the place and told us of how they’d asked a European company to provide some sort of heat tracing component on their pipework.  The company had asked them to send a plan of the facilities so they could get an idea of the workscope, which they did.  A day or so later the people at Angarsk got a call from the European company thanking them for sending the plan of the city, but could they point out which building was their facility?

Our meetings concluded, it was time to head back to the hotel, and then start the journey back to Sakhalin.  Some bright spark had decided that 4:25am was a good time to have our plane leaving, so we stayed up until 2am when we arrived at the airport looking forward to getting some sleep on the plane.  Only when we got there we found the inbound flight from Krasnodar was delayed until 7am, then 8am, and finally 9:40am.  As I said, Irkutsk is probably Russia’s crappest airport, and we had an 8 hour wait to look forward to.

First thing we found was the cafe-stroke-bar, and the first thing we found in there was a an officer in the militia in full uniform, unconcious in his chair beside a half-empty bottle of vodka.  Fortunately, somebody had been smart enough not to give him is gun for the evening.  The cafe in Irkustk airport, no larger than a squash court, sold 27 different kinds of beer and not much else.  Andrei bought a bottle for 50 Roubles.  I bought a coffee in a small plastic cup for 150 Roubles.  Mineral water was 80 Roubles.  Russia’s drinking problem goes deep indeed.  Eventually two scruffy militiamen turned up to wake up the sleeping officer, which after a lot of shaking and jostling they managed to do.  The officer took a few minutes to remember who he was and where he was, then shooed away the militiamen and staggered to the counter where he harangued the sales girl for ten minutes.  Then he stumbled back to his table and persuaded two young Russian construction workers to join him in finishing his vodka with him.  Just as Andrei and I had had enough and were leaving, the officer was generously offering his new companions to drive them around the city all night in his car, which was parked just outside.  Sensibly, they declined.

A lengthy, overnight wait in Irkutsk airport is boring indeed.  There was nothing to do, and sleep was impossible without being completely drunk, and we’d both had quite enough of drinking for the past few days.  One amusing moment came when the offices started to open and a blonde woman in a uniform came about asking to see the tickets of anyone who looked like he wasn’t a genuine traveller.  She siezed upon one scruffy young man with a big blue bag between his legs and his head on his chest.  He looked dead.  Failing to get any response from the man, she lifted his head up only for it to fall back down again.  Eventually he stirred enough to attempt to get his hand inside his jacket to produce his ticket, a task which he failed miserably, so the woman charitably got it out for him and looked at it.  It appears that he was so drunk he’d missed his flight.  Not by an hour or two, but a whole day.  The woman rushed off to fetch the militiaman, who was one of the duo who had tried to wake the officer earlier.  The woman made a big deal of explaining the situation to him, while he stared at the ceiling with a look on his face as if she was telling him her dreams.  Halfway through her explanation, he simply walked off.  The drunk bloke sat there with his head on his chest for another two hours, then finally woke up and wobbled off somewhere.

Finally we got on board our aircraft and endured an agonising three hours to Khabarovsk.  We had missed our connection to Sakhalin by a few hours, but Dal’Avia had kindly rebooked us on that well known airline, Air Union, based out of Kranoyarsk.  I think they buy their planes second hand from Dal’Avia.  We had a couple of hours to kill in Khabarovsk airport, so we went back to the bar where we’d downed the vodka four days before.  Amusingly, the woman behind the counter recognised us, probably hoping for more speedy business.  Once again, Andrei bought a beer for 45 Roubles, and I bought a small cup of coffee for 160 Roubles.  Sitting beside us was a group of seven or eight Russian men who had stank of booze and were drinking even more.  Andrei and I were minding our own business, talking to each other in English (his English is better than my Russian, and I’m bone idle), when one of the Russians commented that I was English.  His next comment concluded we were both English.  After a few minutes, he turned round and swore at us in Russian, something to do with foreigners being in Russia, to which Andrei swore back.  This surprised him more than a bit, and he asked Andrei if he spoke Russian.  Andrei swore at him a bit more, built into an admission that he was Russian.  I then cheerfully told the man, in Russian, that I was a Brit who spoke Russian and could understand everything he’d been saying.  This was a bit of a lie, but it served its purpose of making him look like a complete twit.  Funnily, he and all his mates suddenly got very friendly, and even more so once I’d told them I lived in Russia.  They apologised profusely, asked me lots of questions, and got me half-drunk by breathing on me.  Then they sent their boss over, who told me they were all drill operators from Okha working for Rosneft.  The boss knew three words of English, but more significant was his missing index finger on his right hand.  I’d be willing to bet a few quid this was pinched off by a spinning drill pipe, and a few more quid that he was drunk at the time.  He told me the work for Rosneft was extremely hard and paid awful money.  If he and his crew will be extracting the oil for the company which will be providing the western world with its energy for the next fifty years, we’re all in trouble.

Finally we boarded our plane back to Sakhalin, and I was too tired to even care when the pilot slurred and stumbled his way though the pre-flight announcement.  Or maybe I’d simply grown immune to drunken behaviour over the past few days.