Enchanting steppe and labor camps

Denis

After enjoying life here with Simone and Leonid for a few days, we set off to explore the rest of the island for ourselves. Tanja has packed enough food and because we can draw our drinking water from the Baikal we only fill our rucksacks and the water bottles on the bike. “See you in a few days,” we say goodbye to our two hosts. “Have a good and safe journey,” they reply. As soon as we leave the Buryat village of Charanzy behind us, we are greeted by a long climb. The road is narrower and decidedly worse than before and is mainly used to take tourists in four-wheel drive vehicles and minibuses to Cape Choboi, the northernmost point of the island.

Once we reach the highest point, we find ourselves in the center of an enchanting hilly steppe that reminds us of Mongolia. Low rainfall and a high number of hours of sunshine have shaped this grassland with its countless small colorful flowers and numbingly fragrant herbs. Edelweiss and wild thyme with its small red-purple flowers, which is collected and added to the tea, stretch out towards the sun. We pause to catch our breath and listen to the crickets chirping. Millions of grasshoppers, beetles and butterflies bear witness to life on this fertile, green savannah. Sometimes we surprise one of the gophers living here, who are then terrified and panic-stricken and try to escape. A few kilometers further on, a dense forest swallows us up. We make very slow progress and with our luggage it is more difficult than we had expected. We are now often forced to push. Deep, rain-washed holes, bumps, ruts and mud alternate with fine sand and dust. Unexpectedly, countless, sparsely vegetated, almost mighty sand dunes appear. From this point on, the path sinks into deep sand. Many of the cars are forced to turn back if they don’t want to risk sinking up to their axles here. Moving forward means hard work for us. A car is being pulled out of the mud by a jeep. Another is waiting for help because he can no longer get forward or back. Four-wheel drive minibuses shoot past us. They force us to push our heavy bikes off the lane into even deeper sand. Once I don’t make it in time. With great effort, I am soon desperately trying to leave the soft lane as a minibus races towards me. My front tire keeps slipping. The driver is completely unconcerned. He doesn’t even try to brake. Just a few more meters and he’ll run me over. “Ahh!” I yell in horror as he races past my bike at a distance of ten centimeters. Just a little lurch in the sand and the bus would injure me or flatten me. “Phew,” I groan, pushing my bike out of the lane as quickly as possible so as not to fall victim to another moron. The material is under extreme stress on this route. Some of the Rohloff chains drag through the deep sand and leave their own thin trail. “If only this goes well?” I ponder, because there is a horrible crash and crunch as we try to cycle sections of this spectre. “Do you think chains can withstand that?” Tanja now asks. “Who knows? It’s the first time on the entire Trans-East expedition that we’ve overcome such material-destructive conditions. It can only be a matter of time before the sprockets and the Rohloff chains are refurbished. I hope they can withstand more than we give them credit for. Even if the island is beautiful, it’s not worth a total loss. We still want to reach Mongolia and that’s a good 1,000 kilometers away,” I reply anxiously.

Then we catch sight of Baikal and a wide sandy beach. “Let’s find a camp here,” Tanja suggests, and I set off to find a suitable place to camp for the night. On the beach, some Russian tourists lie in the sun like walruses. They have set up their tents next to it. Although there is still plenty of space for our camp, I prefer to spend the night alone and hidden away. This guarantees peace and quiet in any case. At the end of the bay, where the sandy track winds its way back up the mountain, I think I spot a suitable place. “Let’s push to the end of the bay. It looks good there,” I say, and we push our sumo bikes further through the sand.

In the middle of the sand dune valley, apart from two or three inhabited wooden huts, there are dilapidated and abandoned houses that make an unconventional impression on us. “Was this once a village?” asks Tanja. I study the map and read that we are here in Pestschanaja. The name of this abandoned hamlet is derived from the sand. The hairs on the back of my neck stand up as I read on. We learn that we are in the center of a former Russian labor camp that processed fish in the 1940s. Until the times of Perestroika, most of the houses in this camp were still completely preserved. Only then were they completely dismantled by the islanders in order to take everything they could possibly use. My gaze glides over the broken houses, whose old wooden walls seem to speak of suffering, arbitrariness, injustice, pain and death. I suddenly think of the time of terror in Russia. The time when Stalin sent millions of people into exile or had them killed outright. Some of Russia’s construction projects were built by prisoners and exiles, such as the petrochemical plant in Angarsk and the construction of the railroad line from Taishet to Brask. After the Second World War, millions of prisoners of war toiled in Siberia. A large number of the 600,000 Japanese prisoners of war were imprisoned in the Baikal region. Germans and Italians cleared forests, built roads and industrial plants. A human life was worth nothing and many of the soldiers did not die in the war, but died years later in inhumane conditions in the notorious gulags. It was an endless suffering that is still sung about in Russian songs and ballads today.

A few small minibuses are parked next to the former jetty, which only burnt down in 2003 due to the carelessness of some fishermen. On the other side, a family has built a new hut that serves as a store. There, hikers and thirsty drivers can buy some food and, above all, beer and vodka. Lost in thought, we push our bikes past the store and lean them against a broken wooden fence under the astonished gaze of the vacationers. I set off again to explore the area for a place to camp. In fact, behind the last poor wooden houses, a few meters next to the grave of a man who died in 1977, I find a fantastically beautiful piece of earth. We set up our tent on a green meadow on the sloping bank. Larch trees stand on the embankment and give us a view of the turquoise-blue Baikal. The sandy beach is about 30 meters below our pitch. I walk down the grass-covered embankment to have a look at the beach. If I didn’t know we were in Siberia, you’d think you were on a sandy beach in the Caribbean. It’s 5 p.m. and still pleasantly warm. Seagulls sit on the water and let themselves be rocked by the gentle waves. Their many tracks in the sand bear witness to the fact that they are at home here. As I learned from Simone and Leonid, I strip naked and jump into the cool waters of Father Baikal. All tiredness is immediately shot out of the body. “Uuuaaahhhh!”, I snort and shout loudly and happily. Just a few minutes later, I leave the cold water again and walk along the beach looking for beautiful stones. What a liberating feeling it is to be able to walk around as God created us. The bathers are about two kilometers away from us on the other side of the beach. Nobody wants to come here. Far too far away from the store. Thank God. “Denis! Can you get me some water, please?” I hear Tanja’s call coming down to me from the camp over the embankment. “Sure,” I reply, run upstairs and fetch our Ortlieb water basin. As the water has become cloudy due to the waves breaking on the shore, I am forced to go back into the lake, which is perhaps 12 degrees cold, up to my chest. Here I scoop clear drinking water, without bird feathers, algae and churned up sand into the tank. Back at camp I look for firewood. The stumps of old trees, felled perhaps 30 or 40 years ago, protrude from the meadow. I try kicking them and lo and behold, they move. Their roots have rotted away over the decades, so I can pull the stumps out of the ground with a little effort. “It’ll make a great campfire,” I say, lighting the old tree stumps. We now sit together in front of the big, warming fire and watch the day slowly fade away. Although it gets relatively chilly after sunset at this time of year, we can sit for a long time because of the heat radiating from our fire. We look up at the starry sky and are happy to be free. Happy to have been born after the Second World War. We cherish this moment of not having lost our lives here as prisoners of war and hope for a time in which people no longer resolve their conflicts and disputes through war and barbarism, but through dialog and discussion. Even if it may take an infinitely long time for us humans to realize that we cannot permanently resolve a conflict with war, murder and death, we firmly believe that we will reach this state in the course of development. Reach before we have wiped each other out.

We look forward to your comments!