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Along The Katun River To Chemal Siberia travel destination
Between Mayma and Chemal the rock- dotted Katun River weaves prettily through forests and between tall grey cliffs. Villages all along the route have a range of accommodation from basic summer huts to swanky new hotel-style complexes, many operating from May to September only. Most people simply come to unwind but between all those vodka-drinking sessions with holidaying Siberians you can usually arrange easy rafting day trips. Tour agencies in Barnaul, Novosibirsk or beyond have extensive catalogues, but in July and August many have minimum three-day stays and most are heavily prebooked.
Sprawling between mountains, landlocked Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk is the booming cap- ital of Sakhalin. At times on its main strips (ul Lenina or Kommunistichesky pr - still keeping Marx happy with newly made street signs) you have to struggle to see Russia. There’s not a lot to do - that is if you’re not in town bound for oil rigs or construction projects - but it’s a good (and the only) starting point to the rest of the relatively unexplored island or the Kuril Islands, and it offers some flashy restaurants and bars.
From the execution of Tsar Nicholas II and his family in 1918 to the high-profile Mafia killings in the 1990s, Yekaterinburg is notorious for its bloody history. Contemporary Yekaterinburg remembers these events, attracting pilgrims and tourists alike to the sites associated with the Romanov deaths.
Located 14km south of central Tula and around 240km from Moscow, Yasnaya Polyana is the estate (238 6710, 517 6081; www.yasnayapolyana.ru; admission R100; 10am-5pm Tue-Sun May-Oct, 9.30am-3.30pm Tue-Sun Nov-Apr) where the great Russian writer Count Leo Tolstoy was born and buried.
Yaroslavl, 250km northeast of Moscow, is the urban counterpart to Suzdal. This is the biggest place between Moscow and Arkhangelsk, and it has a more urban feel than anywhere else in the Golden Ring. Its big-city skyline, however, is dotted with onion domes and towering spires, not smoke stacks and skyscrapers. As a result of a trade boom in the 17th century, churches are hidden around every corner. The poet Apollon Grigoryev wrote: ‘Yaroslavl is a town of unsurpassed beauty; everywhere is the Volga and everywhere is history.’ And everywhere, everywhere, are churches.
For somewhere that’s over 1000km from any- where much, Yakutsk comes as a pleasant, and sometimes surreal, surprise. Over half of its inhabitants are Yakut - and a good portion of the remainder are Chinese immigrants - so it feels (despite the Lenin statue) less Russian than many places across the Far East. Most of its buildings stand on stilts above a cruel permafrost that never thaws. It’s most isolated when the weather’s misbehaving - as winter frozen-river highways thaw, and earth turns into an unnavigable slop.
The Kola Peninsula’s southern shore, on the White Sea, is a beautiful, pristine and completely unspoilt coastline with some fascinating architectural, archaeological and geological sites - still largely undiscovered by the outside world. The Varzuga River provides some of the very best salmon fishing in the world.
The route looping round to Abakan from Tuva via Askiz is scenically varied, often beautiful and mesmerisingly vast in scale, though the Chinggis Khaan stone near Ak-Dovurak is the only real ’sight’. Independent travellers should be aware of Western Tuva’s fearsome reputation for wild lawlessness and unprovoked knife attacks. Even other Tuvans are nervous about travelling without a truly local companion. Sayan Ring tours come this way.
With its birch forests, idyllic rivers and endless rolling steppe, Western European Russia is an enticing vision straight out of Russian folklore. Those seeking the soul of Old Rus would do well to explore this historically rich region, as the charming old villages, photogenic fortress towns and gold-domed monasteries are just part of the lure.
The 3100km-long Baikal-Amur Mainline (Baikalo-Amurskaya Magistral, BAM) is an astonishing victory of belief over adversity. This ‘other’ trans-Siberian line runs from Tayshet (417km east of Krasnoyarsk) around the top of Lake Baikal to Sovetskaya Gavan on the Pacific coast. Begun in the 1930s to access the timber and minerals of the Lena Basin, work stopped during WWII. Indeed the tracks were stripped altogether and reused to lay a relief line to the besieged city of Stalingrad (now Volgograd). Work effectively started all over again in 1974 when the existing Trans-Siberian Railway was felt to be vulnerable to attack by potentially hostile China. Much of the route was cut through virgin taiga and pesky mountain ranges. To encourage patriotic volunteer labourers the BAM was labelled ‘Hero Project of the Century’. Even so, building on permafrost pushed the cost of the project to US$25 billion, some 50 times more than the original Trans-Siberian Railway.