Kolyma, Russia, Siberia, Sibirsky Extreme

Yagodnoye

August 8, 2010 Walter Leave a comment

Back on the main road and heading North, we were stopped by a big 4WD van from Magadan. It was a bunch of guys from the local 4WD club “Nord Trophy”. A few of the guys recognised me. We had all eaten sushi together in Magadan last year with Tony. It is a small world sometimes.

Dinner time came in Orotukan. Sherri Jo treated me, since it was my birthday. The next town with a hotel was still 140 km down the road … Yagodnoye. We had little choice by to press on. I bought a birthday beer, tucked it into my riding jacket, and we headed off into the evening light.

Sherri crossing the Kolyma River: The river whose name is associated throughout Russia with two things, death and gold.

Just as it was getting dark (around 11pm) we pulled into Yagodnoye, found the local hotel and I cracked open my birthday beer. It was an unusual birthday (as mine usually are) – it had started with caviar in an abandoned town, ended with a beer 350 km down the road, and in between I had made it to a Gulag. I was chuffed!

Kolyma, Magadan, Russia, Siberia, Sibirsky Extreme

The Gulag

August 7, 2010 Walter 3 Comments

My birthday began in the tiny cabin in Myakit … Sherri presented me with a card and present. I had taken a tub of red caviar (salmon roe) with me from Magadan. So on the communal bench at Myakit my birthday breakfast was caviar on bread. I piled it on thick and ploughed in, while the locals opened the first beers of the day!

The main mission for my birthday was getting to a Gulag. Gulags were set up under Stalin’s regime to use political prisoners to mine the abundant gold and uranium deposits that had been discovered in the Kolyma region. The prisoners were treated appalingly, had to labour through winters of -50 C, slept in the most primitive of conditions, and not surprisingly, many died. When the needs of the state required more labour for the Gulags, the rate of political arrests was stepped up. A huge department was set up to administer the Kolyma Gulag system – Dalstroi. Magadan itself was built only in 1939 to serve as the port and logistics centre for the Dalstroi project. Into Magadan’s harbour went captive prisoners, and out came the valuable gold and uranium that was bought with prisoners lives.

The whole Dalstroi project was incredibly inhumane and estimates are that of the 3 million who went in, an incredible 700,000 people died – in the Kolyma Gulags alone (In the Soviet Union as a whole, up to 12 million people when though Stalin’s Gulags). When Stalin himself died in 1953, his successors, most of whom were appalled at Stalin’s barbarity, began closing down the Gulags. Most were closed in the 1950s, a few lingered on till the early 60s. Ultimately, any surviving mine sites were converted to towns, with paid labour doing the mining, under normal Soviet working conditions (actually they were paid up to 3 times what people made in Moscow, to encourage reluctant miners to move to such a remote region).

Our friends in Magadan had given us the GPS co-ordinates of a Gulag not too far from the main road. Generally information about Gulags in the region only comes by word of mouth. The local government in Magadan Region wants to move on from Dalstroi and the Gulag histories. A few locals who had set up tour businesses specialising in trips to Gulags have been shut down by local authorities. It’s a bit of a taboo subject. The handful of westerners who do make it to Magadan are usually either mad motorcyclists or geologists. Almost none take the time to seek out a Gulag. It was something that I had wanted to do last year, but had no location information. I didn’t know where to find a Gulag. They don’t have signs pointing to them. Most are down tracks that have hardly been used in 50 years. And now we had information about a Gulag and the condition of the track leading to it. The track was challenging in bits, but do-able by a loaded bike.

Sherri Jo knew the track to the Gulag would be tough for her, but for her as well as for me, a visit to a Gulag, the very reason everything exists in the Kolyma, was too much of a rarity – too much of a highlight to pass up.

Two hours down the Gulag track and we got there. Dneprovski. An abandoned tin mining Gulag, that had shut down in 1955.

Wild blueberries grew everywhere and made for a nice lunch.

The ride back was quicker. Sherri Jo was picking up the art of riding a loaded bike over this kind of terrain, and she listened to advice. She was handling most of the water crossing completely unaided now.

Kolyma, Magadan, Siberia, Sibirsky Extreme

Magadan

August 7, 2010 Walter 1 Comment

We arrived in Magadan … at last:

Checked into a hotel and made our way down to the bay:

That evening we had dinner with Ilya (our main contact in Magadan) and Prokhor in the Green Crocodile pub. Tony and I had drank with Ilya and Prokhor in the same place last year.

Ilya showed me some of his photos of 4WD expeditions around the Road of Bones and its side roads. One of his expeditions had some fotos of Rayil … our friend and the head of the 4WD club in Yakutsk.

The bikes still hadnt arrived by the morning of the 28th July, so Ilya took me out to an ocean fishing beach near Ola, 40km East of Magadan.
It was like shooting fish in a barrel. Nets were full of huge salmon, and apparently this isnt even a good year.

You need a licence to fish in the sea in Russia, and the licences cost 100 rubles per day, plus 46 roubles per fish. A pretty small sum when you saw how mush Salmon was on hand. This guy had 2 huge bags filled with salmon in the back of his 4WD … probably 10 salmon per bag. I asked him how long he had fished to get this huge haul. “About 30 minutes” he replied.

As the salmon flayed in the nets, seals began appearing … to try and steal some:

And where there are seals, there are those that hunt the seals. About 50 yards offshore, the Killer Whales were feasting!

The next morning (July 29) we were down on the dock … the bikes had been on desk, and so were going to have a bit of rust on them. But for 4000 rubles, we weren’t complaining. The bikes were offloaded, and Sherri watched on nervously.

So now we had the bikes free in Magadan. It was time to begin the ride. And about time too!

. . .

29.07.10 … 4pm

We pulled out of Magadan, but not before a return run to the fishing beach. I had told Sherri Jo about the seals and killer whales, and she wanted a piece of that action. Sadly while the day before there had been hundreds of seals poaching away, today there were barely a few, and no killer whales. All I could see was fishermen hauling in their nets.

We stopped to pay our respects at the Mask of Sorrows, the monument to the estimated 700,000+ who died in Stalin’s Kolyma Gulags.

We saw a Trekol, a very cool, hard core Russian recreational vehicle. One of these 6WD babies will set you back over USD 40,000.

Before long we were out of Magadan and on the open road. The start of the Road of Bones. The first 180 km heading north is paved and we made good time. About 50km short of Atka the asphalt stops and this was the first chance I had to see what my riding companion for the next 3 weeks or so is like in the dirt. First impressions were that Sherri Jo will be fine. She listens to advice, has good basic technique and her initial speed of 50 km/h (30 mph) on dirt roads is mainly due to inexperience on this kind of road. I told her she will be comfortable at 100 km/h (62 mph) on dirt by the time we reach Irkutsk.

We reached Atka, our first refuelling stop and filled up. A landcruiser pulled up and an Aussie geologist and his entourage stepped out. He warned us about bears. Apparently it’s a big year for bears this year. We took that on board and went down the road to the café for some dinner.

We had left Magadan at 4 in the afternoon. Daylight would last till 11pm. It was 9:15pm by the time we finished dinner and hit the road north. 11pm should take us to an abandoned town called Myakit. There was nothing before Myakit, nothing after it for another 150km and there were no hotels where we were in Atka … camping was dodgy, considering we had just been warned about bears. One thing was in our favour … there were a lot of wild bushfires in the area and the air was thick with smoke. Bears dont like smoke.

So why were we heading for Myakit, Sherri Jo wondered … Well it wasn’t completely abandoned. About 10 people still lived there. And I had a contact in Magadan who knew them all.

We rode through the diminishing light and just before 10:30 pm we arrived. The town must have been something once. Apparently 5000 people once lived there. It was hard to see any signs of life, but eventually we spotted them and rode over. After introducing them and bringing personal greetings from our contact in Magadan, we were welcomed with open arms. Everyone was sitting around a table eating their evening meal, having a few vodkas and chatting. We were immediately made some fish soup, tea and made to feel at home. One guy gave us his home for the night and said he would sleep in one of the other homes. It was a nice welcome to rural Russian hospitality. We eventually went to sleep about 1am.

Dalny Vostok, Russia, Siberia, Sibirsky Extreme

Goodbye Vladivostok

July 28, 2010 Walter 7 Comments

We had one final day in Vladivostok before flying North to Magadan to rendezvous with our bikes. It was a last chance to capture some images of this once closed port city. The weather was humid and fog filled the city, as usual, so I decided to shoot people rather than scenery:

Sailors down near the Naval port:

A couple in the central square:

Visiting US and Japanese sailors got into a bidding war for this old Russian Naval uniform.

And down by the Submarine war memorial, another typical local couple.

My final act in Vladivostok – I popped into a badge shop I had found late last week. Lucy, the badgemaker there had whipped for me a new supply of Sibirsky Extreme badges … and had put together for me an all new badge … the Road of Bones badge – for people who have ridden, cycled or driven between Yakutsk and Magadan.