Travels in Siberia (57 page)

From Ulan-Ude, Sergei and I rode a bus six and a half hours north along Lake Baikal to the town of Ust-Barguzin. We woke up before six, packed, and made it to the Ulan-Ude bus station by taxi in plenty of time. We had presented our tickets and found seats on the bus when Sergei discovered he still carried the plastic room key card from the Hotel Geser in his pants pocket. He told me to tell the driver to wait for him and he went back to the hotel to return it. He’s sixty-one years old, no cabs in sight, so he runs the two-mile round-trip on icy streets in just under twenty minutes, and he’s back before the driver has started counting heads and making ready to leave. Sergei wasn’t even terribly winded. I told him that in America no one thinks twice about walking off with those keys. That’s what I would have done. Sergei said that the woman at the reception desk was very grateful to him because she would have lost her job for not making sure he had returned the key card when he checked out.

Our route that day followed the same road I’d been on with Sasha Khamarkhanov when we went to Lake Baikal years before. Now, though, deep snow had altered everything; I guessed that garbage in a landscape may not seem like such a big problem if it’s buried under snow for eight months of the year. The ride was uneventful, even though four kids who looked to be no more than fourteen were drinking two-liter bottles of beer in the backseat. When we stopped for a lunch break at a little café on the way, all four kids were still able to walk. They disembarked, and then got back on carrying more two-liter beers in their arms, their eyes bright with anticipation, like kids on a school trip to an amusement park. As the bus continued, two of the kids almost passed out, and the other two, although more functional, were keeping their comrades upright and requesting emergency stops so they could help them off to vomit. I was impressed at how quiet and relatively well organized they were.

Ust-Barguzin is a large village at the mouth of the Barguzin River, where it flows into Lake Baikal. The location is only about thirty miles from Barguzin, the village I’d visited before. Sergei discovered when we arrived that Ust-Barguzin has no restaurants and no hotel, so after everybody else had gotten off, he and I remained on the bus and asked the driver what he recommended we do. For a small amount of rubles he drove us around the village while Sergei kept asking people on the street if they knew of anyplace we could stay. Again, Sergei’s M
C connections
came in handy. The village, with its good harbor, has a large M
C station whose main business is doing rescues on the lake. Even in winter, a lot of M
C guys were on duty. We got out there. One fellow I talked to said that he was in Ust-Barguzin on a six-week assignment and that he lived usually in Chita. The M
C guys made some calls and found a family who said we could stay at their house for the night.

Later, after I got back home, I sent a Christmas card to our Ust-Barguzin hosts, Sveta and Tolya Belov, so they could put it in one of the scrapbooks they keep of cards and photos they’ve received from people from all over the world who have stopped at their house while visiting Baikal. The guest book they showed me, only their most recent one, contained names and comments in many languages and handwritings. Just glancing through I noted that a Rose Bodette, of Toledo, Ohio, had stayed with the Belovs, as had a Mr. Nofziger, of Liberty City, Ohio. I would never have guessed Ust-Barguzin to be such a crossroads.

The Belovs’ house was several small houses grown together into a rambling big one. They had eaten supper already, and served us a meal of
omul’
and pelmeni and pickled wild mushrooms and fresh-baked bread. Afterward, Sergei and I went to their backyard
banya
for a sweat and a wash. In the cooling-down room, the Belovs brought us a chilled beverage made of cranberries and water from a healthful spring. The rest of the evening we sat around their kitchen table and drank tea and talked. Tolya Belov was a truck driver who drove a regular route between Ust-Barguzin and Ulan-Ude hauling freight for a local home-furnishings company. Sveta ran an after-school program teaching kids about ecology. Tolya was big and barrel chested, she smaller and dark haired. The previous fall they had gone on a vacation trip by car to China, where they had filled their vehicle with fabric items they had bought for unbelievably cheap. Sveta showed us bath towel after bath towel. Tolya said it takes them several days to drive to Heihe, the Chinese city across the Amur River from Blagoveshchensk. He said he loves to eat in the restaurants there because the portions are so big.

I gathered that a part of the Belovs’ income also relied on out-of-nowhere travelers like us. Tolya told us about a Russian couple who were taking a Siberian motor trip the summer before, and as they passed along the shore of Baikal, a rock rolled down a cliff and hit the car and broke a part in the wheel. The couple hitched a ride to Ust-Barguzin, where they
ordered a new part from Germany on the Belovs’ phone. They stayed with the Belovs for a night or two, then hitched back to their car and camped by it in the forest for a month until the new part arrived. The man installed it in the wheel and the couple went on their way.

Calls came for Sergei throughout the evening from his new friends at Ust-Barguzin M
C. The next morning at seven, a four-wheel-drive jeep-style Niva, an official M
C vehicle, pulled up out front with two drivers. Sergei had arranged for them to drive us on the ice road for two hundred and thirty miles to Severobaikalsk, a city at the north end of the lake. He loaded our stuff in the back of the Niva while I was still in the Belovs’ vestibule trying to pull on my extreme-cold Frankenstein boots. I just could not get them on. I fell over onto the cement floor in the attempt, but kept on pulling. Sveta came out while I was doing that, and she looked down at me in surprise. I guess that’s not how Russians put their boots on.

After goodbyes to the Belovs, Sergei and I climbed into the Niva’s cramped backseats. For a few miles we drove on a narrow trail through shoreline forest to the point where the trail came out onto the lake. Ahead was Baikal’s blank white surface with faint wheel lines on it running onward into the distance. We pulled onto the ice and stopped. Aleksandr, the driver, flipped down his visor against the glare and put a cassette of a singer named Mityaev on the tape player. We sat idling for a moment waiting for the tape to catch. The first song was “
Zdorovo!
” one of Mityaev’s hits. Aleksandr turned the music up and we sped off across the lake.

“
Zdorovo!
” means “Cool!” It’s a general expression of approval, defined in older Russian-English dictionaries as “Well done!” or “Splendid!” Recently the more hip and casual meaning has taken over. The song’s chorus goes
“Zdorovo, kak zdorovo . . .”
(Cool, how cool . . .). The song is your basic pop earworm, upbeat and irresistible, a good driving song. But I thought I also heard deeper Cossack strains in it well suited to a day in a heavy-duty vehicle on a Siberian road of ice. The drivers replayed the song many times.

At first we headed west, to get around a peninsula north of Ust-Barguzin called Svyatoi Nos (Holy Nose). Then we turned northeast, paralleling the coastline. During parts of the day, snow and mist filled the air and we could not see land. At other moments we came in close to the shore and rambled around in coves and bays. Both drivers—I didn’t get the other one’s name; he was a stocky Buryat with a short beard, one missing tooth, and nicotine-stained fingernails—wanted to see the caves along the shore and talked a lot about them. From close up, the cave formations with their icicles like stalactites hanging down and folds of snow partly veiling their entrances suggested a complicated stage set for some Wagnerian fable. In most of the bays we explored we saw no tire tracks besides our own, and no signs of people among the tall firs and cedars on the hillsides.