FAR EAST 2009

Why had I agreed to do it? Spending four mid-summer days lounging by the Russian Pacific, all accommodation paid, loosely ‘supervising’ a bunch of local university students as they worked in a tourist resort seemed a great idea. That is, until I discovered that the train journey from my adopted Siberian hometown of Chita and Russia’s Far East would take two and a half days each way.

Late one July night, I packed up my rucksack, bade farewell to my girlfriend and snuck through Chita’s deserted night-time streets to wait for the Moscow-Vladivostok train. Some poor souls already on board would be spending seven days crawling across Russia- a country 71 times greater than the UK in size. I felt grateful to be doing only the Chita to Ussurisk leg, a journey of some sixty-odd hours. My trepidation was to prove unfounded- my trip to the Russian Pacific was, it turns out, a Big Adventure and an experience to be remembered.

Time and train meandered onwards as my kindly fellow-travellers conversed and included me in their picnics, among them the secretary of Jozef Kobzon, a favourite singer during Soviet times and honoured ‘People’s Artist of the Soviet Union’. Though of Jewish rather than Buryat origin Kobzon had spent the preceding few years representing the small Aginsk Buryat Autonomous Region’s interests in the Russian State Duma and, judging by his popularity and the good condition of that enclave relative to the surrounding Chita Oblast, doing a decent job. I had always found Kobzon’s music cheesy and appearance intriguing as his wig looked like it was made of plastic and made him resemble a Lego man.

The wagon’s conductor was a genial lady who at each stop would open the door, see me ready to charge off and explore and rapidly photograph whichever remote outpost we were passing through, and tell me exactly how many minutes we had to spare before departure. At places such as Amazar, Yerofei Pavlovich and Obluchye I had enough time to sprint into the villages, take a few snaps, and run back to the platform where the kindly conductor would usher me back aboard. The sight of this frantic foreigner in their midst was probably unusual for the locals, but I had long before- and since- been fascinated by the nature of life in these railway settlements, dots on a map of emptiness joined only by the umbilical cord of the Trans-Siberian Magistral. Almost all of these places had been born during the railways’ construction in the late nineteenth century and had survived largely as settlements of railway workers, sustained by supplies along the railroad. Mining settlements had also sprung up here and there. Some had populations of a few thousand and even a few blocks of Soviet flats among the usual wooden huts, yet some were hamlets so small as to have names no more descriptive than, for example, ‘6,235km’. What is life like in such towns? I’m still none the wiser, but emigration of the younger generation in search of opportunity has of course become more problematic since the easing of (some of the) Soviet-era restrictions on internal population movement.

We left Zabaikalsky Krai, crossing Amurskaya Oblast and passing through the town of Never and the quiet oil-pipeline settlement of Skovorodino, touted by some as a future boom-town, especially if Russian government plans to start building a cosmodrome nearby for space launches come to fruition in 2015. Next we entered a Russian region I had longed to visit: the Jewish Autonomous Oblast (JAO). A remote sliver of mosquito-infested swampland along the Chinese border ‘gifted’ to Jewish settlers by Stalin in 1930, this region and its capital Birobidzhan were trumpeted as a Soviet Zion and attracted thousands of Jewish settlers during the 1930s. Typically, Stalin’s fickle yet iron fist then attempted to crush expressions of national identity across the Union, and many settlers, already frustrated by the hardship of trying to build their agriculture form the bare and poor local soil, made good their leave. Today, of Birobidzhan’s population of around 200,000, only around two thousand identify themselves as Jewish. There have apparently been attempts at reviving Jewish culture in the JAO, dedicated Hebrew schooling and newspapers among them, but today the city is all but Russian in character. Alas, our stop there was in the middle of the night but I was not going to miss my chance to glance a place whose story had long intrigued me. I jumped off the train and snapped the station sign, rendered in Hebrew lettering and arguably the most prominent symbol of Jewish culture which remains in the JAO.

The final stop-off was the longest of all: an hour spent in Khabarovsk, the large city which sits on the Amur river, staring across at China and, historically, acting as a Russian sentinel in this territory which has changed hands many times in the past: indeed, the Russian Far East, to the east of Khabarovsk and including Vladivostok, has only been Russian since 1861. I happily mingled with the locals as they took their evening strolls in the leafy parks, found a clothing shop named ‘Assol’ and saw, for the first and no doubt far from the last time in Russia, a multi-storey car park. A Khabarovsk supermarket even stocked Worcestershire sauce, one of the few British treats which I really missed.

The next morning we drew into the Far Eastern city of Ussurisk, its many flower beds now blooming pleasantly in the summer sunlight. My onward instructions were sparse: “Get a bus to ‘Haiti’ tourist base, near Andreevka”. I knew not how far Andreevka was, or whether it was a village or a metropolis. I found the bus station easily enough and encountered a friendly worker there who asked me where I was going. When I told him ‘Haiti’ he replied, apparently without irony (or accuracy) that Haiti is in South America and that I was in the wrong place. Even so, I managed to buy a ticket to Andreevka and found my bus. I asked the driver, a typically worn-down-looking Homo Sovieticus type, if he would kindly tell me when we reached Andreevka so as I may alight. This I did politely, face-to-face, from about two yards away. The rude bastard flatly ignored me. I boarded the bus, seethed for an hour or so and squinted at every road sign and place name we passed, until thankfully a fellow passenger said that they would tell me when we reached Andreevka. I was to get my revenge on the rude driver later in the week…..

We rolled through undulating green hills backed by the mountains that signal the start of Chinese territory, onwards towards the Pacific. We stopped at the town of Slavjanka where the local market consisted of a few fruit stalls and a lot of Chinese clothing spread out, apparently unsorted, on the ground on a tarpaulin. Here I was fascinated to see a monument to the Soviet fighters of Lake Khasan. I knew I was somewhere in the Far East, of course, and also knew that the Khasan Incident of 1938 between Japan and the Soviet Union had occurred pretty much where China and Russia meet North Korean territory…… but were we so close to the North Korean border? I dared to hope so: I’ll probably never be allowed to visit the Hermit Kingdom in my lifetime but I sure wanted to glimpse it from afar.

Almost as soon as the great ocean finally hove into view, along a wide, sandy beach hosting an idyllically sunlit azure bay, so too did a dirty great big neon sign reading ‘Haiti’. In no mood for niceties, I grabbed my things, barked at the driver to stop and flounced away towards my holiday home.

Conditions at Camp Haiti were indeed basic, as was the constant diet of buckwheat served up to the resident workers. One female student had apparently taken one look at the ‘village-style’ toilet (ie hole in a wooden hut) and burst into tears, but the wooden bunk rooms were perfectly habitable and, having introduced myself to the Chitinsky students, I decided to muck in with a couple of hours’ shifting of the seaweed which constantly washed ashore and covered the otherwise picture-perfect beach. This I did to demonstrate that I was not just after the free holiday, but I soon realised that almost nobody around the place was there to do anything strenuous, and that this ‘work experience’ in the travel industry largely consisted of sitting around sunbathing and keeping half an eye on holidaying kids as they bounced on climbing frames and flung themselves down the water chute. During quiet times the students would sunbathe on the foot of the inflatable water slide, and I soon discovered the joy of sneaking up to the top and hurling myself down, the resulting splash invariably dislodging the unwary sunbathers and dumping them onto the sand. The student party consisted of a dozen or so girls and two chaps, one a quiet but friendly Buryat, the other a Russian who was quite personable yet tended to get smashed on vodka and start shouting in the foulest imaginable language as soon as his shifts finished. Usually in tow was an extra young chap from Chita who was actually visiting as a tourist but who had become bored of his family’s company and decided to tag along with our merry party. Nobody minded as he was perfectly pleasant, and was in fact the spit of the Simpsons’ Mr Burns.

Paddling in the shallow Peter the Great Bay was a delight, the water warm, tourists zipping around on inflatable bananas or parascending behind speedboats. The flora and fauna of Russia’s Maritime Province was evidently much more abundant than in Zabaikalye, verdant mountain ranges ringing the bay and giant black butterflies belting out from their cliff homes to forage over the bay. The first time I saw one of these apparently-rare creatures overfly my bonce I thought I had been buzzed by a disorientated and diurnal bat.

One student had bought a map of the locale and I was delighted to see that Camp Haiti was tucked far into the southern end of Russia’s Maritime Province, on a spit of land hemmed in by the mountains of China and- for nineteen heavily fortified kilometres- by a border with North Korea. I have always wanted to visit the Hermit Kingdom and here I was, spending a few days 50km or so from that very dystopia. I had no intention of sneaking across the border and getting myself imprisoned but I sensed an opportunity to visit Khasan, the small Russian town sitting on the North Korean border. I asked a few locals if I would be allowed to visit Khasan and they replied that yes, of course I could, and seemed to wonder why I’d felt the need to ask.

On my third full day in Camp Haiti I decided to try to flag down a bus and get as close as I could to Khasan. I flagged down the wrong one and ended up not heading west but towards the other side of the bay and a tiny port named Zarubino. On the bus I saw an athletic but unshaven chap approach the driver and ask in an obviously non-Russian accent ‘Zaroobeeno’? Reasoning that most travellers speak English I offered to help and was answered in a West Midlands drawl. Said chap had apparently bicycled from Coventry to Ukraine with his wife, hopped onto a train as far as Vladivostok (long way, that) and were about to board a ferry bound for South Korea. I helped them unload their gear and pay the driver (he demanded 20p for my informal ride), found the ferry office, helped them buy some biscuits, gratefully accepted two of their well-thumbed English paperbacks (gold dust) and waved them on their way. I ran into a couple of workers from Camp Haiti who had nipped into Zarubino on a moped for supplies and established that I was in no way heading in the direction of Khasan, so decided to poke around. Having discovered that Zarubino- earmarked as a possible future gateway port for Korean commerce- was a typical Russian village of a few thousand living in wooden huts and Soviet blocks, I struck for the Pacific. In contrast to the golden sands of the bay the coast here, on the ocean itself, was rubbish-strewn shingle, so I carried on along the coastal road past a huge, grand, abandoned but formerly grand building (military, I would wager) and encountered a rusting sign announcing ‘Port Zarubino Naval Base’. There seemed to be nothing to stop me wandering onwards but, mindful of being accused of spying, I wandered around the vast, decaying and almost-empty commercial port instead before cadging another bus ride back to Camp Haiti and resolving to try my mission afresh the next day. I later discovered that in August, rare and beautiful wild lotuses flower at a lake in Zarubino. In my enthusiasm for its post-Soviet decay I had missed a renowned spectacle.

So, the next day, with the sun beating down, I told one of the dimmer students that I was going to try to reach Khasan, and set off walking along the road west, thumb extended. Car after car and (annoyingly) bus after bus passed by- the very one I actually needed twice- and one motorist stopped to ask me how to get to Andreevka, from which direction I had just trekked. After eight kilometres I finally reached the main highway to Khasan. I sat wearily down in a bus shelter, seeking solace from the sun, only to realise that I had sat in the only bus shelter in Russia to have been painted in the last twenty years, and that my new trousers now had a patch of thick blue paint on their seat. I reasoned that buses must surely stop at a bus stop, so waited a few minutes before a ragged middle-aged woman came stumbling along, apparently out of nowhere. She stuck out a thumb and soon an ambulance stopped. She leaned in and begged a lift. I thought that naming Khasan as my destination in an obviously foreign accent would ring alarm bells so plumped for the village before it on the highway: I cheekily stood up and said “Kraskino?” to the paramedic in the passenger seat. She waved me to get into the back where I encountered, sitting amongst the medical paraphernalia, the ragged woman and a man with a huge, bloodied cartoon-style bandage wrapped around his head. We sped onwards along the Pacific coast to Kraskino, me thinking that I couldn’t possibly make this stuff up.

I alighted in Kraskino, had a quick look at the huge abandoned barracks (the Chinese threat is more economic than military nowadays) and the monument to local fighters lost in the 1938 Khasan Incident, realised that no public transport went to Khasan, and so decided to hitch onwards. As I was crossing a bridge just beyond the village, a truck roared past, straight through the numerous cowpats on the bridge, and covered my lower half in shite. There was no way anyone was going to pick up a heavily-spattered hitcher so I returned to Kraskino, wiped down my trousers, and took the last bus back to Camp Haiti. When I arrived there the relief on the faces of the students was immense: they explained to me that Khasan lay in a restricted border zone and that, even though I had taken my passport and visa with me, I needed special permission to enter and would have been arrested had I set foot there. The student I had spoken to that morning had not grasped this, but his colleagues clearly had, and had spent the day waiting for news of my arrest. As it happens, I had been saved by the truck/cowpat assault- perhaps the Russian border guards were unleashing their latest hi-tech weapon on me in order to avoid incident?

The final day in Camp Haiti saw the students and myself treated to a boat ride across the beautiful bay, us tagging along with a diving expedition that would surface with handfuls of starfish and the odd octopus. The natural beauty of Russia’s Maritime Province in summer is truly something, small islands and rocky bays glistening against a backdrop of wooded high mountains stretching into China, and dwarfing the destruction wreaked by Homo Sovieticus.

At Camp Haiti worked Sasha, perhaps just over fifty, wiry, rake-thin and heavily-tattoed, who when discovering that an English bloke was around, extended an invitation to come and join him for an evening drink. Fearing that the ‘evening drink’ would be a never-ending vodka-fest, I politely declined but on the final evening my two male room-mates and I decided to relent and, in the quiet darkness of a hot summer evening, padded along the beach and knocked on the door of Sasha’s hut.

All was quiet but our knocking roused a bleary-eyed Sasha who had been asleep with his lady ‘spouse’, as he called her. She introduced herself through the wall as Sasha arranged a table and chairs outside, laid out an impromptu feast of cold meats and vegetables, and told his other half to start boiling eggs. His story was fascinating. As a young man Sasha had earned his roubles as a card trickster: the Soviet authorities rewarded him with 27 years in jail. His painted body told that tale, as with many former inmates in Russia, and he was proud to tell the stories behind his many tattoos. One in particular caught the eye: a large head of Lenin with the Russian word vozhd beneath, meaning ‘Leader’. Our host’s hospitality was impeccable, him drumming up a meal from nothing in seconds from meagre provisions having just been roused from slumber. Alas, I am no fan of hard-boiled eggs and I declined Sasha’s offer of an egg with my vodka. He persisted, which after half an hour or so began to irritate me, to the point where I (by no means drunk yet) stood up and stormed away shouting in Russian “No thanks- thank you- good night!” As I strode huffily along the beach alone I felt I was facing something of a crossroads, and a test of my maturity. My petulance was, I hope, out of character but even so I knew that I had childishly stormed away from a man who wanted nothing more than to welcome a foreign visitor to his table. Now was the time to swallow my stupid pride. I got a grip, turned on my heels, walked back down the beach, apologised to Sasha and my two room-mates, and we carried on drinking as if nothing had happened. Sasha apparently spends his summer months in that beach hut and his winters in a flat in Vladivostok: I sincerely hope that in his later years he is finding happiness and compensation for the years spent in Soviet slammers.

Before departure from Haiti I was delighted to see pulling into camp a bus driven by the driver who had so blatantly shunned me back at the start of my Far Eastern odyssey. I grabbed the opportunity to jump onto the bus and loudly declare to his tens of passengers in appallingly-accented Russian “This driver is a very rude man. VERY RUDE!” Petty, perhaps, but I felt better afterwards.

As we waited from our train back to Chita at Ussurisk station I queued for a hot dog and found myself alongside a group of North Korean workers, dressed in drab grey overalls and sporting, to a man, their Kim pin badges. The Russian vendor ignored them, although it was obvious what they wanted, and so I offered to help in both English and in Russian. They ignored me and shuffled off back to a waiting room to join their work group. My guess is that any contact with anyone for anything other than a functional purpose (for example buying food) could have landed these poor chaps in deep water.

In Russian third-class trains people sit around tables during the daytime, folding those tables away to become beds at night. My table-mate was a man of around sixty years, named Volodya, on his way from Ussurisk to his hometown Birobidzhan in the Jewish Autonomous Region. Though not Jewish himself his genial sense of humour and refusal to answer questions with much more than an equivocal smile put me in mind of Jackie Mason, and indeed Volodya assured me that many in Birobidzhan shared a similar approach to life. I asked him (as I am prone to do) if he preferred life in modern Russia or under Soviet rule, to which he smiled slowly and replied “Some things are good, some things are bad”. He did, however, let slip that he still regarded Uncle Joe Stalin as vozhd and exactly the type of chap Russia needed to bring ‘order’ nowadays. Upon retiring that evening, Volodya insisted that I had the more comfortable bottom couchette as he “didn’t want an international incident if I fell out of the top bunk”.

The students settled into a travelling rhythm punctuated by endless repeats of a new Russian pop song, which I liked on first listen but hated on the millionth. Our male Russian student, after a futile walk up and down the moving train in order to find a stronger mobile signal, ploughed straight into the vodka, thankfully falling asleep pretty quickly after ramping up the volume and my having to tell him to tone it down.

As I walked down the carriage I noticed that a tall, dark and obviously foreign chap was reading an English guidebook. I introduced myself and it turned out that Patrice, a Frenchman, had driven his tiny Peugeot 205 from France to Chita, encountering remarkably few bureaucratic or Mafioso obstacles along the way. Hearing that east of Chita the roads turn to dust and mud he had decided to visit Vladivostok by train and was now on his way back to pick up the car from a pound near Chita cathedral before driving casually back to France. He had visited 112 countries, a figure which my students could barely comprehend, most of them claiming never to have been abroad since Russians tend not to count forays into nearby China to buy DVD players as visiting a different country.

At Khabarovsk a group of boys who had become acquainted with our female students back at Camp Haiti were waiting at their home station to renew friendships. They took advantage of the one-hour train stop to sit and drink with our Chita lasses, and as the train drew out of that fine Pacific city, a commotion started. The visiting boys had failed to exit the train. Next stop Birobidzhan, 200km to the west. Panicking, they pulled the stop cord somewhere in suburban Khabarovsk, legged it across the tracks with transport police piling off the train in pursuit, and disappeared into the gathering dusk. I had to spend a good few minutes smoothing things over with the carriage conductor, since the perpetrators of this fairly serious offence had quite obviously been visiting my students. We were spared a whacking fine and escaped with a telling off, and as the students bunked down I returned to my berth. The surrounding passengers sympathetically asked if I knew why the train had lurched to an emergency stop and so, in my poor Russian, I explained. Volodya chuckled, quietly and slowly delivering his verdict….. “The adventure continues”.