The Nomads of the Talbooash

Coohkboohk sat on a steel-framed single bed covered in thick woollen blankets and yak skins. Her frame was so frail than she appeared almost weightless.
Her face was the colour of dark leather and so furrowed that she her whole features had with time become frozen in a symphony of emotions ranging from surprise, to extreme tranquillity, to the purest gentleness. Her slanted eyes were tiny and almost disappearing being the heavy curtains of her eyelids, but sparkling like the river rushing alongside her ger. To us Coohkboohk was the mountain itself, so shaped and coloured by her environment as to emanate it within and without. We were in the Valley of the Goddess and Coohkcboohk was the Goddess.
At Coohkboohk’s feet sat her son Volodya, smiling proudly, encouraging us to drink more of his delicious yak milk, and eat yet another bowl of sweet curds.
His niece Kuruz, her long black plait swinging softly past her waist, was filling up bottles of milk for us to take home.
Then Marc took out his flute and began to play. The sound of his music filled the soft, circular interior of the ger. The whole family sat rapt and smiling in respectful silence, Koohkboohk’s eyes luminous in the gloom, fixed on Marc’s flute.
Rain begun to fall outside, drumming lightly on the felt cover and falling in brilliant dust through the round opening at the centre of the roof.
A ger is a little circular house made of felt. It is so robust and warm that no matter how demented the mountain weather outside, inside it the atmosphere was almost womb-like in its calm and warmth. In the middle sat a rusty stove in which our hosts were burning flat cakes of cow-dung. In a circle, along the walls of the ger were two beds and a cooking stove. Saucepans were neatly hooked-up on the wall above it, with next to it large bags of flour and dried curds. Kuruz piled a plate high with the flat golden breads she had just baked for us and more milk was poured into our bowls. We talked of our countries and families, but every times we offered thanks for the extraordinary hospitality we were shown we were only met with slightly surprised looks, as if gratitude was not expected of us in the least. Upon arriving we had offered the family some gifts of rope and horse blankets, also a good stainless steel shackle I had taken from my boat. The rope was Volodya’s favourite. He suspended it to his belt and kept stroking its soft fibres. Bringing rope as a gift, or anything to do with horses was a splendid idea given to us by Tim, an Australian friend who had already spent close to ten years in this part of the world and twice travelled the whole length of Russia and Mongolia, once on a bicycle and once on horseback, a trip which took him from Ulaan Bator to Hungary and which lasted over three years. Tim had spent much time with the Nomads, Kazakh Nomads such as Volodya’s family among others and knew much about their customs.
Volodya’s family owned six hundred and fifty horses and almost the same number of horses and cattle. They owned several winter corals as well as this ger, in which they spent the summer, high in the mountains where the pasture was rich for their herds. Volodya had seven children and was himself one of five. Koohkboohk was the elder and matriarch of the clan, much loved and respected babushka. Koohkboohk spent her days looking over the goats, enveloped in her perennial calm and the aura of her resplendent smile.
When it was time to leave we were accompanied by the two young boys Amoohr and Agailek, who were in charge of escorting us to the safest place to cross the river to get back to the truck and our camp.
Saying goodbye was not easy. Even in two short visits to the ger and such a short time in this miraculous land we had already become so attached to our hosts that the realisation that we had to leave the next day and travel to Tashanta and the Mongolian border left us dreamy and a little sad.
We had journeyed so far to find these people.
We had journeyed so far to gaze into their eyes and learn some of their mysterious ways to live in this world in such a light way.
What we learnt in meeting them we cannot put in words, or film, or pictures.
They left in our heart an indescribable feeling of peace and hope for the future of the world. We live at a time when most scientist and environmental specialist tell us that we are doomed, that human beings are the cancer of the world. Yet upon watching these people live their simple, rich and peaceful life one cannot but feel that it is possible for a human to leave no mark upon the world.
For thirty thousand years men had lived in this valley, yet the valley had remained unchanged, or perhaps unchanged by its inhabitants if not for the general effects of Global Warming which, Volodya explained, had made the permafrost of Mount Talbooash melt to barely a patch of grey ice over the past ten years, something that had never happened before, he explained. Now the river flowed faster and the shape of the valley begun to change. More and more often, spring would come too early and then freeze again, creating a hard layer of ice, which the animals couldn’t break. Every year, Volodya lost hundreds of animals. For some herders of the Altai, the situation sometimes meant that they would loose most if not all their herds in just a few days, leaving them to starve. The effects of these disrupted weather patterns are felt all throughout the world, yet in fragile eco-systems such as the Altai it is quickly becoming disastrous. The Nomads have done nothing to contribute to this deterioration of the world, yet they are some of the most directly affected by it.
Once, walking alone in the mountain I came across the print of a ger in the soft ground. Around the abandoned camp were scattered a few bones and a tiny felt shoe, forgotten behind. These were the only evidence that there ever were people living for months in this place. A soft print in the grass, a few bones, a leather baby shoe that they had stitched and embroded themselves, with you could tell just by looking at it, all the love in the world… these were, with an oval pile of stones which marked the grave of a dead, the only visible testimony that this had been a whole family’s home, just as all the mountains around were their home, since the beginning of time.
There is no electricity in the steppe or the mountain, there is no running water, or TV or phone, yet these people have so much in just the way they are.
As we packed up to leave we saw Agailek and Amoohr playing near the river. They stood on one leg and tried to capsize each other, a simple game which absorbed them completely. The sound of their laughter followed us far along the trail back to civilization, high and pure in the mountain wind.

Children of the Mountain

As evening came we set up camp in the shelter of a small rocky hill in the centre of the Valley of the Goddess.
Here and there, among the rocks and stubby mountain grass were randomly scattered hundreds of animal bones, but no signs of herds.
The valley lay empty, swept by wind and the dying sunlight streaming between the clouds.
In the truck Maya cooked ‘five fingers’, a traditional dish of boiled horsemeat and large, flat noodles that we all shared out of one bowl and ate with our fingers.
The mountain air was sharp and cool, and every now and then the crack of thunder resounded deafeningly over the mountain.
Our dry cow-dung fire belched thick, fragrant smoke but kept us warm as a few large drops begun to fall, pushed hard by the wind. We huddled closer to the fire as Agalash strummed his two-string Altai sitar, conjuring visions of galloping horses and cascading rivers.
Agalash could not have been more than fourteen years old, but his aplomb and virtuosity was arresting. His fingers rushed along the neck of the sitar without the slightest hesitation. Only two strings to the instrument but we were awed by the richness and diversity of the chords and melodies he played. His typically Altai features were set in an attentive mask, his gaze shifting from hand to hand and every so often to briefly gaze at his mother.
Agalash’s features, set well beyond his age were fascinating to observe. His quiet confidence and calm assessment of our motley crew was something typical of the Altai people.
The next morning, when two little Kazakh Nomads materialised seemingly out of nowhere next to the truck, riding a stout and gentle looking pony, I again found myself captivated by the serenity of their features. Riding saddle-less and with a hand-made bridle without a mouthpiece, the two little boys were one with their mount. The pony’s ears twitched to attention at their slightest movements, listening intently to the tone of their voices, as if the animal’s only concern was the safety and contentment of its mount. With the boys were two big dogs resembling a cross between a German Sheppard and a sheep. The dogs also seemed rapt in their role of protector, circling the boys and keeping a suspicious eye on anyone coming close to them.
Where had these boys come from? I wondered as I looked around. There were no signs of gers for kilometres. The valley was empty but for a large herd of about a hundred cows grazing peacefully across the river, slowly progressing north. These cows were probably the charge of these two little shepherds, who would not have been more than ten years old and who in spite of their obvious curiosity in our sponsors’ logos bedecked truck and our strange, dirty faces, did not forget for an instant to keep an eye on what was happening to the cows and their young, especially as some of them attempted to cross the dangerous, fast-flowing river.
Amoohr and Agailek were their names, Altai names they added with pride.
They dismounted and sat on their haunches in the hot sun, giggling at our earnest attempts at communicating with them in a mix of Ramsay’s hilariously inventive sign language and our few words of Russian. They pointed toward the deepening gorge, to the side of the mountain where we suddenly made out the shape of a ger, tiny in the distance.
‘Our family is living there’ they said. ‘You are welcome to go and meet them’.

The Wild Path

‘Are you ok up there?’ shouted Ramsay
We could just see the top of his mushroom-style ponytail prodding out from the truck’s window.
‘All good! Go for it!’
Already, the truck was lurching forward, jolting over stones and into the potholes of the track as Marc and I held on for dear life to whatever we could find to steady ourselves against the wild rocking of the truck beneath us.
Riding on the roof of a truck on a mountain track is no mean feat, but a million times more fun than to sit inside the madly crashing cabin, especially now that we were no less than height people, plus a dog.
Marc and I looked at each other, wild with fear and boundless hilarity.
The truck moved in hic-ups in a storm of noise and dust, while we laughed so hard into the wind that our lips became glued to our teeth.
Behind us rose a cloud of dust, blurring the mountains in the distance.
Inside the truck were crammed Anna, the Russian girl who had joined us two days before, Maya, our Altai guide and her teenage son Agalash, as well as our usual crew: Inge, Isa and her freshly adopted dog Sasha, (who was definitely not used to travel in such conditions, hid his nose under his forepaws and vomited everywhere), plus off course Ramsay, our trusted driver, negotiating each bump and dip with a master’s touch.
After our near disaster in Omsk, when our back wheel had almost fallen off, we all felt each of the traumatic jerks with very much concern. Three of the bolts holding the wheel to its hub had completely cheered off. Some of them were altogether missing and others had been replaced with the only bolts we could find, which were of very poor quality steel and kept snapping every few kilometres. To make matters worse, the hub itself had suffered damaged, with some of the bolts mountings widened and misshaped after we hit a stone at high speed on the bumpy Siberian roads between Kurgan and Cel-Abinsk.
Riding on the roof of a truck climbing a pitted mountain pass is quite an exhilarating experience. The only thing I could hold onto with my only good hand, (the other one having been permanently shattered three months ago in a bench-saw accident), was the bicycle’s handle-bar, itself holding by one thin rope to the stub of an old antenna on the roof. As the truck lurched on across the deserted pass, bouncing me laughing from side to side on my precarious perch, I couldn’t help but struggle to maintain some kind of blind faith in the safety of my anchor. If the bicycle broke free, I would fall off almost four metres straight onto very uncongenial looking rocks.
If opting to travel on the roof of your vehicle as opposed to inside it may seem a bit reckless, in this situation it was categorically the less worst possible way, if not downright the best. Bumps were felt a million times worse inside the truck, where to borrow Ramsay’s expression, one felt like a sock in a tumble-drier. The only manageable place to sit without ending-up covered in welts and bruises was on the front seat, which was normally designed to accommodate three people, but which right then was crammed with no less than six unfortunate souls squashed like sardines in a can and near asphyxiated from the hot dust that poured in through the windows. Closing the windows was not an option either. Between the heat and the poor dog’s vomit vapours, the atmosphere inside the stifling cabin would have quickly degenerated into a complete pandemonium.
Meanwhile, between fits of laughter, coughing and disjointed bits of shouted conversation over the racket of our valiant engine and the million things that rattled and banged in the back of the truck, we progressed slowly towards Mount Talbooash, which other-worldly peacefulness contrasted so much with our crazy bunch that this alone was enough to send us into hysterics. What on earth would the Nomads think of us, or anyone else for that matter, if they saw us right now, a tiny but insanely noisy speck slowly inching forward in this empty, age-old valley in a delirious cacophony of voices from six different languages, while Maya looked on slightly alarmed and her son Agalash somehow managed to play his two-string Altai Sitar without missing a note in spite of the mayhem.
The vast plateau, surrounded on all sides by mountains, resembled a large volcanic crater. Its stony, seemingly barren looking ground was interrupted here and there by icy streams bordered by a narrow strip of lush green grass, the only vivid colour to be seen as far as the eye could see.
The Siberian Altai is immense and incredibly diverse in scenery from one valley, or one plateau to the next. If the mountains before Kosh-Agash were richly covered with Siberian Pine or Russian Birch, the plateau we were now travelling on could easily be used in a remake of Mad Max. Cows, horses or yak skulls, complete with horns and frontal tufts of hair were everywhere, bleached white by the sun. Every now and again a marmot poked her head out of a burrow and scurried madly before us before disappearing again.
A few kilometres later, a river suddenly interrupted the track. The stream, swollen by the previous weeks incessant storms, was waist-deep and the current strong enough to send large stones rolling down with it.
‘OK!’ shouted Mark over the gushing river. ‘I will climb on the back platform and film the wheels of the truck as you cross the river’.
Marc, in spite of his quiet looks had quickly revealed himself right from the start to be an amazingly audacious and enterprising cameraman.
He had an eye for exactly what exposures he needed to build up a film and would stop at nothing to get it, even if this meant that he had to hold on by one hand to the bucking aft-platform of a truck fording an icy torrent and film with the other.
Without Marc there would be no film, no documentary at the end of the trip, nothing to present to the sponsors. Without Marc there would be no studio and editing house on wheels. Marc somehow managed to build a short film every couple of weeks, which is quite a feast considering the circumstances. Watching him trying to edit a film on his laptop in the back of the ever-bouncing truck, struggle with the very little available power supply, or even try to concentrate in such a small and crowded place would make anyone cry with sympathy. Marc went on, somehow, uncomplaining, even when after seven hours of struggle with a homespun and temperamental Internet connection in an abandoned coop-farm in the middle of nowhere, staying up half the night while we are all sleeping peacefully, his downloading of the film to our web agent in London failed at seventy-five percent…!
‘You sure you want to do this?’ asked Ramsay incredulously. ‘There is nothing to hold onto on that platform! You’re crazy!’
‘I’ll be fine’ replied Marc earnestly, already finding a way to attach his tripod to the side of the truck and mounting the camera to it. ‘Let’s do it!’
Ramsay climbed in and on we went, down into the rocky river, water almost submerging our gigantic wheels. Our faithful truck slowly jerked itself forward over the boulders, wheel-turn after wheel-turn and we somehow made it, narrowly avoiding bogging ourselves down in the shallows on the other side.
In the rear vision mirror we could not see any signs of Marc.
‘Marc!’ we called, ‘Are you still alive?’
Marc hooted in reply. ‘Its in the can!’ he said. ‘Scary but great! Can’t wait to do it again on the way back!’
The way back… yes, somehow we would have to do all this all over again.
But for now the path lay winding its way higher into the Altai range, a path definitely more suited to horses than trucks. Marc joined us inside the truck and we all shared in the exhilaration with great reinforcements of hooting and slaps in the back.
One thought we all shared though, in spite of our boundless enthusiasm and thrill in each new day of the adventure was the question of whether our back wheel would hold on for long enough to see us back to at least Kosh-Agash or not, in which case we were stuck in the middle of nowhere, days walk from help if ever we could even hope to find some. One after one the bolts broke on the hub and we had run out of spares. Tightening the remaining nuts had to be done every ten kilometres and we were advancing at a snail pace.
In the eventuality that we made it back to Kosh-Agash and bought more bolts for the wheel the problem whoever remained the same. The hub was damaged and needed replacing, something we definitely out of the question. Not just this but our tires also were completely frayed and two of them had already been patched up twice. Our clutch grease-sleeve had also split and necessitated constant manual greasing of the arm or it would get stuck at the most inopportune moments. We were also steadily loosing oil.
After five weeks on the road and eight thousands kilometres our truck and only mean of getting back to Amsterdam was showing definite signs of fatigue.
Would our truck and home to the five of us last the distance all the way back across the Steppes, mountains, forests and deserts we still had to face to get back home?
Time only will tell.

The Valley of The Goddess

Perhaps we have gone as far as one can go into the wilderness.
Further away and we would be getting closer again to everything we ever knew.
We are in the path of the Nomads.
We cannot see them yet but they are here, perhaps even watching us now, from the mountains all around us.
Their presence is everywhere. We are on their land.
The sun is setting between two snow-peaks, beyond the purple mountains.
We are wrapped in the soft curves of the Valley of the Goddess, soothed by her sounds of wind and water.
Our hearts are full of gratefulness. But whom do we thank for such a paradise?
The grass is soft under foot, specked in tiny, multicolour flowers.
The air is sharp with the tang of mysterious herbs.
Shadows of clouds slowly pass across the purple mountain, the oblique rays of the sun dart their slender fingers across the mist.
We are in a sacred place.

Maya wrapped herself tighter in her blanket against the piercing mountain wind.
With one arm, she swept at the vast valley around us.
‘Chingins Khan was here’, she said in Russian.
‘He and his army of thousands poured into this valley on their way to the west. Many Altai men and boys followed them. We Altai people are also descendants of their sons.’
‘This is the Valley of the Goddess’, she said, gazing towards the blinding ice caps of Mount Talbooash.
‘When there was a war, the strongest man of the tribe would climb to the top of this glacier and ask for the Gods to protect his people. It is forbidden to climb this mountain for nothing. You have to do it only for a very special reason. Two years ago two alpinists attempted the climb and they both disappeared.
This valley is the valley of the women, and this mountain is the Mountain God, which protects them.’
She walked to the centre of the valley and stopped.
A pile of rocks lay tumbled atop each other, as if thrown there by the hand of a giant. Small tuft of grass grew between them, hardy and specked with silken bluebells.
On the face of each rock, facing the sky, were scratched into the rocks hundreds of age-old pictures.
My hand trembled as I touched the Deer With Horns Touching The Sky, symbol of Life for the Altai Nomads. My fingers felt the warmth of the stone, the gritty contour of the Deer’s eye, its long and precise line so poignant in its subtle gracefulness.
An Altai Shaman had sat here, just were I sat, with the wind his back and the raw sun on his face, his heart full of gratefulness, scratching his vision into the stone, more than 4000 years ago.
I looked up and grasped the miracle of this moment in time.
Before me were thousands of years of Shamanic pictures, thousands of years of the Altai Nomad’s homage to Life and Nature.
Deer, horses, hunters, warriors; the mountains and the sun… Men on horses with bows and arrows, yaks, sheep, goats with long, curly horns from the bronze-age, but also recent drawings, very thinly etched compared to the more ancient ones, representing cars and trucks, huts, animals in corals.
Maya’s voice, soft and clear, stirred me from my reverie. Her son Agalash had joined us into the mountain. Maya welcomed him inside her blanket, where he sheltered from the biting wind, his bright, deer-like eyes cautiously observing us all.
‘These pictures are to offer thanks to the Gods of Life’, said Maya. ‘We Altai people are Shamanic people who celebrate everything given, big and small, equally. The Shamans painted the dear to ask forgiveness for eating such a beautiful animal, to say thank you to the world for it, because if we do not offer thanks to the Gods they will turn their backs on us all. The animals will disappear and we will die. This is why these pictures were made.’
Around us the deep gorge voluptuous mountains rose like the heavy folds of a curtain into their bonnets of clouds, with on the back rows the sharp needles of the highest peaks, cropped in blinding snow on the blue sky.

Hunched forward against the wind we walked down into the valley.

In the Path of the Nomads

IN THE PATH OF THE NOMADS


Who hasn’t dreamt of the Nomads?

If our own culture has been for so many thousands years deeply seated in its sedentary traditions, if our whole society in fact is and has for ever been entirely based on our permanence to one place, there is however something that has always captivated us, inspired us and fed our childhood dreams.

Who hasn’t once in a lifetime turned the page of a book and fallen in wistful wonder before the image of a tippee in a snow-blanketed forest, a yurt nestled on the flank of a mountain, or a caravan stretching across a sea of sand?

The Nomads have always fascinated us. Perhaps now even more than ever before as we, amidst the tangles of our modern society living, are yearning for our lost freedom, for space to breathe on this crowded planet, for the closeness of a clan, for all the forgotten wisdom of our ancestors. We have forgotten, or even perhaps never experienced, the feeling of wholeness and serenity that detachment from the weight of the so many things that we don’t need and connection with our universe can bring.


Now that a broken wheel has forced us back into the Altai village of Kosh Agash, the memories of the last few days and the overwhelming gratitude at having finally found the Nomads after driving helter-skelter for more than 8000km, through plains, swamps, mountains and forests, patches of wilderness interspersed with yet another grey town with its skyline of belching factory chimneys, its slums and palaces, chaotic traffic and clouds of dust.

For such a long time now, the Nomads have to us been a dream, a vision.
We travelled, and searched. We travelled until travel had become a way of life, until reaching our next milestone had lost its necessity, until we threw away the map.
We travelled until all the things we knew or had ever known about the world we had left behind, had become irrelevant.

There are only 300km separating Swiss-resort-looking Byelokoorika and the valley of the Talbooash near the Mongolian border. Yet both valleys are thousands of years apart.

There are times when fate takes you by the hand.
Finding the Nomads was never supposed to be easy.
Discovering this valley was a miracle.

Had we not met Anna on the side of the road at Byelokoorika as we enquired about renting horses for a week to ride to Mount Beluka, we would have un-knowingly strayed on the wrong path and the secret valley of the Shamans we were about to discover, would have remained a mystery.

From the moment Anna jumped into the truck and pointed forward towards the mountains, it was us, who became passengers.
Suddenly, our fate was in her hands.
The next few days were a blur, a blur of new words and shapes in the fog of our complete confusion as to which way we were going and what was happening from one moment to the next. The map had long disappeared.
We followed our guide.

Packed six in a row on the front seat of the truck we pushed at a snail pace higher and higher into the Altai. All around us the land kept changing. From one turn to the next, from one saddle to the next, pine blanketed mountains turned into giant stony slopes.
Villages became smaller and further apart.
The land lay vast and open, fenceless and wild, untouched.
Somewhere behind these snowy peaks live the Nomads.



KOSH-AGASH


The sun was setting as we rounded the highest saddle and begun a shallow descent into the Valley of Kosh-Agash.
Inge and I sat on the roof of the truck, wild with awe and adrenaline as the truck wound its way down the narrow mountain road. Above us the sky was an explosion of crimson and gold, while all around the mountains were a rolling ocean of blues and purples, capped here and there by snow-covered peaks growing hot pink in the dying light. Down into the valley blinked the few timid lights of a small village nestled on either side of a small stream.

We had reached the village of Kosh-Agash.
Fifty kilometres away, behind the next saddle, lay Mongolia.

Kosh-Agash, means ‘many trees’, ‘strange trees’, or ‘good-bye trees’, depending on who is translating and this is possibly precisely what happened to this region.
As far as the eye can see, there is not a single tree in sight, or not even any signs that there ever were. The vegetation is typical of a high plateau: dry, dusty ground, with the occasional patch of short, prickly grass.
Compared with many other Russian villages we have seen so far, Kosh-Agash is very tidy. True, dust is everywhere, kicked off in the ground in great spirals by the evening wind. But the streets, if they are busy with wondering cows, packs of stray dogs and children zooming about on oversized bicycles, are surprisingly clean. Owner-built wooden houses surrounded by small fences and stables make the place a perfect backdrop for a western movie. Every few houses, no matter how bucolic in appearance, is flanked by an enormous satellite dish in a more or less advanced stage of rustiness. Abandoned military compounds and watch-towers, half of them split and caved in by the eight degrees Richter scale earthquake that shook the valley three years ago, testify to a more turbulent past.


The people of the Altai are very different from the Russian. Their features are distinctly Asian. Their language also, has no connection with Russian.
Altai people are all descendant of Nomads, and if many of them became sedentary during the communist era of Russia, a few of them naturally returned to a semi-nomadic lifestyle after the transition period.
Some of them, like the Nomads we would meet in the Talbooash Valley, had probably preserved their lifestyle throughout 20 000 years without much changes, remaining too remote to fall under the control of the Communists.

Kosh-Agash is inside a restricted area. It is a border town, which has a long past of political unrest and conflicts between Nomads and local Communist enforcement.
To stay here one must apply for a pass, which can take over week to obtain. Of course the pass must be applied for from outside the restricted area, a village fifty kilometres from here where staying for a week or more waiting for our passports would have been a waste of time. The Nomads we have travelled so far to meet are here, in the hills surrounding Kosh-gash. We only have ten day left before crossing over to Mongolia and there is no way we are going to miss our chance to meet the Nomadic herders of the Altai. We have no pass and running into a Police Patrol would certainly mean big trouble. All we could do was make a dash for the mountains and disappear for a while until making a run for the border.

Of Burlesque Beauty

From a naked Russian man stabbing a picture of Lenin with a pirate flag to a taxi driver spending his entire day in his bathroom with Ramsay washing and ironing dry our 20kgs of dirty clothes, to pulling a robber down by the leg from the roof of the truck in the middle of the night as he tried to steal our bicycle, to the ‘Grand Palace Cappuccino Café’ where I am now sitting sipping miso soup in downright aristocratic atmosphere…no matter how hard I try I cannot see any patterns or logic to anything about Russia, anything at all, or perhaps only the fact that nothing is supposed to make sens after all. Why shouldn’t Russia simply be just another allegory to the Absurd? After all, Russia is big, ancient and powerful enough to move to the beat of its own drum.
Outside the café, Omsk is a huge mud-cake baking in downright tropical heat.
Grime-blanketed cars and buses jostle in plumes of dust, the sunlight tinged yellow by heavy skeins of pollution. In a pee-scented doorway next to a trendy department store an ancient babushka in flowered scarf is selling two bunches of wild flowers.

We have journeyed 5000kms now and it is amazing to think that we have come that far. Many well informed people, often Russian themselves had told us before we left that we would never even make it across the border. We were warned of three million different horrible scenarios that would most certainly befall us the moment we approached the border. Corrupted police would stripped us of all our meagre possessions and send us back to Holland in our underwear, we would be mugged and robbed by road pirates, we would get impossibly lost in a country where even deciphering simple road signs takes half an hour of feverish dictionary searching through a maze of impossible looking letters, we would get bitten by poisonous ticks, eaten by bears, bled by mosquitoes, etc. What we were definitely not prepared for, however, was the overwhelming gentleness and generosity of the Russian people, their openness of mind and purity of spirit.
Foggy from lack of sleep and too many conflicting information, my mind is bereft in a sea of nonsensical, tragic or tragi-comic images.

Two nights ago in Kargan, a largish town on the edge of South Western Siberia, as we hopped and bumped on the pot-holed, garbage littered streets in search of a place to wash our clothes, a middle-age man in a sailors’ cap driving a brand new Toyota without a number plate almost rammed himself into us as he tried to attract our attention.
Before any one of us managed to make any sens of what was happening, Ramsay was whisked into the ‘sailor’s’ car and disappeared in a cloud of dirt around the next corner. Had Ramsay just been abducted by a mad Siberian pirate? The old man had something about him that just didn’t seem to fit with the regular Russian we had met so far. If our man looked suspect in his open shirt displaying a shaved chest and an assortment of gold chains he however fortunately didn’t turn out to be an abductor. He and Ramsay re-apeared a little while longer in a symphony of screeching brakes and skidding tyres.
‘Hey guys we’re all invited to this man’s dasha for a banya! Let’s go!’
Hooting with joy we all scrambled into the truck and followed our mad driver guide through the town towards the river, stopping on the way to pick up some honey beer that our host insisted to buy for us. On the way Ramsay, rolling his eyes in astonishment described between fits of giggles how he had held on tight to his seat as the ‘Russian Sailor’ darted through the backstreets towards the river and the rows of dashas (Russian’s home away from home where many people who live in town will spend the summer weekends and grow some vegetables and fruit for the winter).
‘I really thought I was being abducted by the Russian mafia!’ said Ramsay. Struggling to keep up with our guide’s car.
‘then we drove trough these tiny streets with wooden houses everywhere and finally got to his house. There was a big gate and Venis, that’s the sailor’s name, ran out to get his girl-friend to open the gate for us. I couldn’t believe my eyes! The girl was this totally hot blonde absolutely stark naked! You should have seen the foxy way she looked me up and down!’
‘What? Stark naked?’ We all looked at each other in total disbelief.
‘Why do you think he is inviting us to his house?’ we asked, almost beside ourselves with laughter. What was Ramsay getting us into?
The prospect of a banya, which is the typical Russian sauna, followed by a luxurious dip in the river was too impossible to resist though. We were filthy, tired, not sure how to find our way out of town as darkness set in and could be hours away from finding a quiet field to set up camp for the night.
‘We’ll be OK’ assured Ramsay. ‘These two seem a bit unusual but I don’t think they are dangerous at all. Let’s just check it out and if we don’t like it we can always leave.’
Venis’s dasha was hidden behind a tall timber fence capped with dangerous looking barb-wires. Behind the gate was a hidden summer paradise. A tiny timber house decorated with freshly painted timber trimmings in blue and green, typical of old Russian architecture sat in the middle of a garden bordered with a generous vegetable beds, apple trees and pink poppies growing in the long grass. Under a vine a table was set next to television sitting in a garden bed, a fire burnt in an empty washing-machine drum near a cluster of low chairs and cushions, a wooden staircase ran through the woods toward the river, where a rickety timber jetty had been built over the shallows. In the far corner of the garden a little hut with a veranda and a blazing chimney indicated that the banya was ready. Inside Ramsay, Marc and our host were already stripping off, ready to enter the steaming, pine-scented room.
Venis’s beautiful girl-friend Veka gave us some towel and Inge, Isa and I were soon cramming into the sauna alongside the others. Nothing in Venis or Veka’s behaviour indicated any kind of lecherousness. These two seemed the most incredibly pure and innocent darling couple ever. If they moved around completely naked with the greatest ease, this was in no ways alarming. Nudity was nothing to make us dart for cover either. All was well in the world. Honey beer was passed around, the banya was positively searing hot, the river deliciously cool..heaven was a Russian dasha.
But more surprises were waiting for us. Venis and Veka, giggling and muttering incomprehensible words to each other, suggested that we all watched a DVD of their holidays in the Ukraine. Still perfectly naked, they set up my laptop and a few chairs near the fireplace and the show reel started… I almost fell off my chair when among pictures of birds and pretty mountains erupted close ups of naked fannies and Veka in the bath with two soldier under the benevolent look of Venis. This and more of the same. We all erupted in a fit of giggles and threw a few discreet glances at each other. Marc rolled his eyes, Inge stared ahead with the corners of her mouth twitching madly, I lit my cigarette at the wrong end and Ramsay’s chair collapsed in the sand.
Meanwhile Venis and Veka sat and watched without the slightest trace of embarrassment. They shared a completely natural laugh every time another porn picture came on and commented in Russian very professionally about details of the photography. We were utterly dumbfounded.
The show-reel went on for much, much longer as after our initial surprise we struggled to stay awake. Isa and Mark were invited to stay in the little house (were there was fortunately no signs of foul play whatsoever to be had), while Ramz, Inge and I went back to the truck for a night a very perplexed dreams.
The next day was an assortment of hilarious scenes of Venis and Veka doing their gardening in the nude, ending in an incredible finale where Venice in a grass skirt savagely attacked a picture of Lenin with the massive pirate flag we had given him as a present for his incredible hospitality. In spite of their very unusual openness and great sexual energy, Venis and Veka were the sweetest, most generous people we could ever have imagined. The whole stay was one giant fit of giggles. As Ramsay explained later Venis had spent 8 years in a gulag and was probably in a rush to enjoy as much of the freedom he had yearned for his entire life before it was too late.
Later that morning, as we farewelled the happy couple and once again got under way direction Omsk and other adventures, we could not help but feel that, about Russia, as with many other things in general, the more we learnt the less we knew.
To be continued…