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In Irkutsk, Alexei and Ivan are very happy to find me and I am escorted off to the first of three hotels I’m going to stay in there … only the middle one was any good. BUT before I leave the airport, must tell you of a very different little industry around here … Japanese Exhumation Tourism. When you stand by a baggage belt (I use that word fairly loosely, as it’s likely to be a hole in the wall and a roller track system near to terminal collapse) and there are some older Japanese standing with you and then up comes things like brand new shovels, all neatly tied together and then packs of solid cardboard cartons, all brand new, then people like me say “Wotz all this in aid of ?’ I think they are perhaps geologists or the like, but in fact they are coming to look for the bones of their long gone rellies, who died here in WW11 and other local conflicts over the years, about which I probably know nothing. You just never know what travel market you may unearth (well that sounds the best word!) unless you keep your eyes open.
And next day off we jollywell go to see all of Irkutsk. I had been expecting a fairly modern city, but discover pronto that it is anything but … more like 19th C Russia, with trams. It doesn’t seem to have any center and I soon realize like Gertrude Stein who, when visiting Oakland Calif, said “There’s no There, there..”, well she would have made the same observation about Irkutsk. It’s basically a mess. Not nasty, just a mess. Along the riverside, there are plenty of old beer bottles and cans and couples are out in the balmy late night, midsummer air. It’s also the city of brides, as there seem to be weddings all over the place. Brides in the full frou frou and one on a scale of Marie Antoinette with her crinoline and hair much upswept and then sprayed with silver glitter. The fact that she was swigging from a beer bottle just added to the occasion! Honest, she WAS! Another, barely able to stand but still drinking, was a genuine bottle blonde of the old style (ie bright butter yellow curls, think Betty Grable). She had forgotten to get her roots done, so the one inch of jet-black hair did not help the bridal splendor. Nothing like black roots, gold curls, bright metal teeth and a bottle of Corona as the picture to send to all the rellies who could not make it. Most of the bridegrooms and also the rest of the hangers on did not look too happy and the fact that the majority of Russian weddings end in speedy divorce was somewhat reflected in a lack of jollification. Important hangers on also wear a sash, a la Miss World. Brides always troop off to the local war memorial and leave their bouquets there. The town seemed to be full of weddings, with their specially decorated cars, sometimes with two gold rings on the roof.
Best thing in IRK is the art museum which has some really great stuff and is certainly worth the stop. The combination of hard reflecting light from outside, coupled with the neon inside, did not do the pictures much good, as some were so reflective that you had to wander around and crouch down to find the only place you could actually SEE the picture. Ivan, who is all of 30, already twice married and has been learning English for 6 months and is practically fluent, is there with me and enters in to the spirit of trying to improve the visitor experience. We organize one of the babushkas to open shutters and turn off lights in various permutations to see what we could do to better the situation. So here am I, rather than organizing crews on planes, now taking over a large gallery as to what light is needed where. Amazingly enough, the old crone enters into it with alacrity (usually they turn the lights on when you enter each room and off when you leave … it’s a thrilling job). She comes over and looks too and we get on famously (and she asks Ivan to make sure I write it all down in the comments book downstairs, which later we can’t find and them downstairs have no knowledge of…).
We also visit a mini stately home, and do the tour and see where they will have a concert on an original piano that practically went to see Napoleon off from Moscow. The guide here knows the groups that used to visit ex the Orient Express train. I ask her if she knows my French mate Micheline and she does and we do an impersonation of Mich, which has us in stitches. The Russians can be great fun when they want to, but the suspicion of foreigners is still very much there with the older generation.
Next day is spent on and around the River Angara and Lake Baikal (source of no less than a fifth of the world’s fresh water supplies). We do bits by car and bits by hydrofoil, and the local market is much devoted to smoking fish from the river, which we buy and eat in our fingers and it’s delicious. I am smoked trout fragranced for the rest of the day. I invent a story for Alexei that he comes here only to see one of the, shall we say, less than beautiful fish smokers and I christen her Galina and then he says his wife is called Galina, so now we have Galina2 and I get a lot of miles out of that. I fear poor Ivan is going to split his sides if he laughs any more. It was no surprise later to find out they both know Monty Python, which of course sets us off on more impersonations.
We have a nice lunch in the sun and persuade the restaurant that the blasting rock music really does not fit well with it or us. Later we inspect a train we are proposing to move them along on one sector. Had to go to the train yard for that and the lady cleaners, with their hoses sluicing down the outsides of carriages all stopped and stared as our little procession went by, lead by the director of the railway company (I think… I get introduced to so many people so quickly that they become a blur). Anyway, they are not used to seeing forangs wandering around. Then there was the Oceanographical Institute to be impressed by, where a real schoolmarm type, complete with a long pointer, had some locals frozen to the spot, while she probably reeled off endless facts and figures and they looked totally glazed.
We penetrate next day deep into the forest to see a place we shall use for a dinner, complete with a long chute type of thing that looks like it should be in a water park. Apparently it is only used in deepest winter. They pour some water down it in October (which would last nicely as ice until April !) and you climb all the way up with your tin tray, slide down at speed and shoot across the frozen lake and I should think would probably go for miles and have a very long walk back. And did I want a dip in the lake and no thanks and more and more. And I’m taking notes the whole time so I can write it all up later. There are people back home who think I’m perched on a barstool all day, drinking martinis (and of course there are times when I WISH I WAS).
Meanwhile I move hotel like some traveling salesman and the second one is much the best, no a/c which cud be problem on a hot still night, but it cools down quite a lot now and with the window open I am fine, so inshalla’h so will they. I’m not sure about the waiters in the gold bow ties. I meet the lady owner, who is exceedingly grand. Originally from Serbia, her business card has addresses in Russia, Serbia and Cyprus for banking. She speaks fluent, idiomatic English and would take no prisoners. I am quite frightened of her. Later I am at the business center (no capital letters as it really an internet access in an airless room) and have just finished a long message to base and BANG, the lights all go out and I lose the LOT. The air was somewhat blue is all I can say. I found my way upstairs as it was still semi-light and produced my trusty flashlight and flashed it at the reception staff on the way out, just to show them what a super boy scout I am. They were very impressed. We go out and eat somewhere and a lot of vodka is of course drunk, as when in Rome or Irkutsk (which somehow doesn’t quite sound the same).
Finally I am ready to leave for further east and the city of Khabarovsk, so back to the airport and I get my farewell hugs from the boys and they confess that they need a break, as they haven’t laughed so much, so long, for many days and I HAVE to come back with the aircraft.
A break here for you. Think about this. At a Russian airport, like Irkutsk, which comes first: Check in or Registration?
timothyvalentinestravels 