Reshiri Island, Japan

We arrived in Wakkanai at the northern tip of Hokkaido on the 28th July. Wakkanai is a small town, there's not really much to do except very practical things for us: laundry and going to the post office. So the next day we took another ferry which took us to the island of Reshiri within less than 2 hours. The weather was nice and the temperature around 20 degrees which made the humidity easy to stand. We found a nice small, brand new hotel, with a young english speaking owner who knew all about hiking on the island. He also lent us a bike and we rented another one, and went cycling on the island's cycling path, which was perfectly asphalted, with signs telling you when it was going up and down and where to be careful about crossing cars and pedestrians. Just Miguel's bike was a bit small for him...

We also had the chance to observe several families drying seaweed by the shore, and tying them in neat packages:

The next day we went for a hike up a hill and on to a small artificial lake. The Japanese are great hikers, and even this small trail had its difficulties, being quite steep in certain places. As we hadn't done much hiking for quite some time this 3-hour walk was pretty tiring!
On the way back we took part of the cycling route to get back to the harbour. There were even bridges built only for bikes!

As a reward, we found a "foot onsen" (sort of a hot spring bath for feet) on our way back to relax our feet a bit before going to take the ferry back to Wakkanai.

Boat stories

In order to continue travelling on the surface of the earth, we have had to take a few ferries, one in Russia, one in Japan and one between the two countries. The experiences couldn't have been more different....
First of all, we had to get from mainland Russia to the island Sakhalin. We had done quite a lot of research on the internet which revealed that getting tickets for the ferry to Sakhalin was close to a nightmare, especially for foreigners, involving up to 12 hours of queuing and ferries leaving at 2 am. We didn't feel like experiencing all this, but we really wanted to get to Sakhalin and from there to Japan... so, we found a travel agent who organised the tickets for us.
I won't go into all the details, just the result: It was very expensive; we were picked up at the train station from our night train by a travel agent; 5 minutes later we met a Russian backpacker who told us he had only just bought his ticket and that there was no queue at all. But there's no point in regretting when you can't go back, so we just put up with it.
Then it all went the Russian way, but we already expected it:
- Waiting for about 2 hours for the bus to take us to the port
- Boarding a pretty rusty ferry (but everything seemed to work more or less, there were even life vests)
- Waiting until the ferry left (earlier than we thought), queuing for lunch (included in the price), communicating with our (non english speaking) room neighbours
- Watching some ferry employees scratching away the rust on the ship and painting over it (at least this one had a helmet...):
- Spending the night in a cabin as hot as a sauna (we had to open the door in the middle of the night in order to get some fresh air), having an improvised breakfast on deck in the fresh air, watching the green hills of Sakhalin approaching.
A journey of about 20 hours, the Russian way. Fortunately the sea was very calm and the weather always nice.

After a couple of days in Sakhalin, we got up early one morning to take the ferry to Japan. It was raining heavily and we were afraid of a typhoon arriving and the ferry not being able to leave, but the weather improved and we left on time. Arriving to the port was still the Russian way, with a very slow bus (we almost had to get out and push so it would go uphill), followed by a local bus and (fortunately) a local guy showing us the port.
The ferry was Japanese (and the ticket price as well). Meaning: Super clean, nicely repainted, the ship workers were wearing helmets and appropriate clothing, it left exactly on time, the crew was very friendly and smiley and happy to help, there were 4 rolls of toilet paper in every toilet which also had a heated seat. Next to the stairs there were even signs reminding people to hold on to the hand rails (in this lovely Japanese English...):

In economy class, seating was on tatami floors, and a boxed breakfast was served to all the passengers.
The trip took 5 hours and 30 minutes, the sea was calm.
Going out of the port in Wakkanai, the streets were perfect, no holes, perfect white middle lines, the drivers polite. The landlady at the hotel bowing and saying thank you all the time.

In brief: Some kind of a culture shock.
It took us some time to recover from it...

Last day in Russia

And at the same time probably the most Eastern point of our trip. We are in Sakhalin island and tomorrow we will head South to Japan. We are in deep need of some civilization. We are dreaming of Japanese onsens (hot baths) for couple days now. The main thing I've learnt from this two months trip in Russia is that, next time I will travel here I should learn more Russian before hand.
While one can get along the trip and go everywhere knowing just the basic travel Russian (buy train tickets, check-in at hotel, understand the restaurant menu) you cannot really enjoy the country if you do not speak the language. People are eager to talk to you but there is a barrier, museums are just in Russian, books in shops which could give you ideas where to go are just in Russian.

But I've enjoyed a lot, even if I've dozens of complaints. I found great the Buryatia School and the chance given by Aiuna to us to be the first foreigners to visit those two small villages near the Mongolian border. I found wonderful to travel day and night in the on-time Russian trains, in the open platskarty compartiments full of people, full of smells, full of live. Was magic to visit and sleep at local people houses, see their habits, understand their difficulties and hear to their dreams. An important Russian word I discovered here was "Remont" (repair). I hope much of it gets fixed before my next visit. I definitely want to redo this whole trip in some years from now (even if some places I would like to re-visit soon).

More posts about Russia will come later. Now is time for quick re-look into Japan (we were already there two weeks in 2007).

Russia impressions during a morning before going out of the hotel

1) At the end of the breakfast we leave the bill with the payment over the table and leave. A waiter comes behind asking if we did not forgot to take the receipt with us. Ok, this could be the case. Anyway, we took 3 times the breakfast there,the waiter that takes the orders never could get it completely right (once gives tea with lemon instead of milk, other time a different type of kasha, today only one tvorak instead of the two we asked).

2) We meet the guy from travel agency who is selling us the tickets for tomorrow's boat to Sakhalin. First time we use a travel agency for something, but we do not want to make 10-hour queue not speaking russian that every travel blog talks about for those who tried. He wants to know the wagon of the train where we will arrive to Vanino. Eva says she will pick up from the room. He says he will come with us. Ok. Arriving to the room, Eva opens the door and immediatly he gets into the room as if it was his also. Lack of private space is common everywhere in Russia.

3) After doing the check-out from the room - which in Russia includes to ask the lady from the floor to check that we did not broke or steal anything -, we ask in the reception where we can leave the luggage. "What?, leave luggage?,  maybe the security guy knows...". The security guy seemed a bit more used to this practise which I tought it was universal. Except here.

Komsomolsk-na-Amure

We are in Komsomolsk, in very eastern Siberia. It's a so-called "BAM-town". The BAM is the "Baikal-Amur-Mainline", a railway line that goes further north than the transsiberian, built during soviet times, mostly by Gulag workers doing very hard work. Before this, there was not much here, so all the towns along the line have been founded in the 1930s, and most of them are correspondingly ugly and uninteresting. Komsomolsk was founded by the Komsomol, the Soviet youth organisation (you can see that Russia is still clinging to its Soviet past - not only Lenin statues, but also town names have not changed since). It's a surprisingly nice town, with wide streets, a not-so-ugly city center and a riverside with a few terraces where we've been sitting and eating shashlik and drinking beer. There's a tram going from our hotel to the river, although waiting for the tram at the stops is putting our lives in danger, as one has to wait in the middle of the road between the cars (see photo).

We also visited its municipal museum, which tells the history of the town from its previous inhabitants (the original people here are asian, Evenki and Nanai and many more... but nowhere in the museum do they tell what actually happened to them....) to the modern town. Well, as already said, nothing seems to have changed much since the fall of the Soviet Republic. We still pay 3 times more than Russians for our ticket. The workers who built the BAM and the town are glorified, but it's never mentioned that many of them were forced labourers from Gulag camps. When talking about war, the language goes pretty much like "the horrible Japanese tried to invade us but we went there and defeated them" and so on (by the way, this reminds me of a young Russian woman we met some time ago who told us that at school they still learn that Russia was "THE winner" of the Second World War and that the USA were the losers).

Well, the museum still showed some interesting photographs but not much explanation even in russian. At the end, there was a room with stuffed animals from this region, including a beautiful Amur Tiger (I think they are close to being extinct now).

Close to the museum we found our favourite cafe (which was unfortunately closed the day after, for "technical reasons") where they served a big and cheap lunch meal, the waitress actually smiled to us and said words like "please" and "thank you". After 2 months in Russia, we are happy with very simple things! :-)

Last night the food situation was more difficult, some cafes were closed which gave us the choice of a fast food (where we had already been the day before and eaten cold hamburgers), an expensive Japanese cafe with sushi (which we will hopefully eat next week in Japan so no need to go there) and the cafe of our hotel. We decided for the latter one but when we arrived there it was quite full and only one person taking orders and serving. I started to queue at the counter (that's usually how you order here) while Miguel kept a table, but there were other people in front of me and things were incredibly slow. After 20 minutes or so of waiting, we decided to leave and went to the supermarket instead to buy fish and vegetable dumplings, salads and drinks, which was just as good as the cafe.

Tonight we will take the night train (our last train in Russia!) to Vanino where we will (hopefully) be met by a travel agent called Nataly, who (hopefully) will have tickets for us for the ferry leaving (hopefully) sometime during the day for the island of Sakhalin. Whereas taking a train in Russia is usually straightforward (the train network is the biggest in the world, and it's about the only thing in this country that seems to work most of the time... we never had a major delay), taking a russian ferry seems to be another kind of adventure, with long queues, delays, cancellations, blond manicured ladies sitting behind counters and refusing to sell tickets and nobody knowing what's going on. So we decided to so this via a travel agency, which was not cheap at all but we hope that we will be spared the stress and hassle. So, if everything goes right, we should be in Sakhalin on Sunday, and go to Japan from there.

Itchy, itchy, itchy....

Since our 4 nights spent in Dora's apartment in Severobaikalsk (see previous post), I have maybe 20 or 30 little red spots on my legs, itching like hell. Most of them are in lines of 3 or 4, making it easy to identify.... BEDBUGS. I have been scratching my legs ever since (which means for 4 days now), applying Fenistil gel and finally taking Zyrtec. This is typically one of the "diseases" you never learn about as a doctor unless you specifically do some reading, so I tried the internet to know more. And I got answers very quickly on http://www.bedbugsguide.com/what-are-bed-bugs.htm
So, tonight I will empty and clean every corner of my backpack and inspect my night clothes. And as one can read on the website, the reaction can continue for as long as weeks (!!!) so I guess I will continue with Zyrtec for a while.
AHHH as I write this my ankles start itching again.....
Hm, the pleasures of travelling.
;-)

Siberian Food

Typical Siberian (or rather, Buryat) food: Pozy (kind of stewed meat ravioli) and beer.

Channels availableon our black-and-white TV of the Tynda hotel room

1 - Russian Channel 1 - they are making fun of someone
2 - Channel Russia - series
3 - REN
4 - NTV - "crime"/"police" type program
5 - Sport - Ragueby (today was synchronized swimming)
6 - DTV - russian movie
7 - TNT - "crime" type program
8 - Sport "flash back" - old american sports channel (from the 70s?) dubbed in Russian
9 - MTV dubbed in Russian
10 - Cultura - travels program from BBC dubbed in Russian
11 - Explorer - american dubbed in Russian
12 - Russian Cinema channel
13 - Children channel
14 - Cartoons channel
15 - Drive channel - some car series dubbed in Russian
16 - Hunt and Fishing channel
17 - there were adversisements
18 - Retro channel - old russian movie
19 - National Geographic - dubbed from the american
20 - Train TV - only about the Russian trains!!
21 - Illusion channel - some movie
22 - Computer games channel
23 - Cartoons channel
24 - Style TV - copy of the Fashion TV in Russian

At the northern tip of Lake Baikal

After our 36-hour train trip making a big loop from Irkutsk to the northern end of Lake Baikal, here we are in Severobaikalsk. A small, quite uninteresting place, apart from it's nice lakeshore with a small beach (although we saw nicer beaches on the Eastern shore).

When we arrived at the train station 3 days ago, a lady with a single golden tooth started talking to us in French. It was Dora, originally from Moldavia but has been living here for 25 years, struggling to make ends meet (as a lot of people here) and renting out a room in her apartment. As she's the only French-speaking person in town (probably in the whole region), she also tries to take care of all the French and Swiss tourists that get lost in this little part of the world. She had just been hosting 2 young students from Fribourg and offered her room to us. Well, it's no luxury... the beds could be more comfortable, the bathroom is simple (but there is hot water), and her son smokes in the toilet, but we accepted anyway. Yesterday she bought the first washing machine in her life (for our standards, a really bad quality one, not much better than handwashing, we had to wash our underwear twice...) and she was so scared to use it. After we had assured that we had used about 30 different washing machines in our lifes and always managed to make them work, she accepted that we use it and show her how it works.

Two days ago we visited a small hot springs village, 45 minutes from here on a bumpy, non asphalted road (but the driver was driving almost normally). The so-called "spa" was actually just a small wooden house (as you can see on the picture) with 2 changing rooms and a terrace with two small hot-water pools, and a lot of mosquitoes. One of the pools was so hot I only managed to go in until my knees, although Miguel managed to go in all the way. The other one must have been around 40 degrees. Russians love this kind of thing, believing strongly in the healing power of such places.

This reminds me of one of the village schools in Buryatia, where one of the teachers proudly told me that they now had a "health education programme" in the school. Oh, how interesting, I thought, what's that all about? Well, actually it was just about taking the kids to the hot springs nearby....

Anyway, after soaking in hot water for an hour or so, being eaten by mosquitoes and having some surprisingly nice food in a cafe nearby, we came back to Severobaikalsk in the same minibus, which was over-full this time. Miguel had about 3 cm on a bench next to a fattish lady, I was sitting on the floor. But it was the last bus for the day, so no choice.

Yesterday has been rather lazy, sitting by the beach, swimming a bit (Lake Baikal is pretty cold), taking care of our suntan, and later on sitting on a terrace eating grilled meat next to a group of middle-aged ladies, celebrating something and all being completely drunk on vodka. Unfortunately this is a very common picture in Russia, with usually a couple of kids completing the picture (they are the only ones that are not drunk...). I'm getting tired of it, really.

Tomorrow we will continue our trip on the so-called BAM, the Baikal-Amur-Mainline, a train line further north than the "classic" Trans-Siberian, built mainly by Stalin (and a lot of Gulag workers). The nature is supposed to be beautiful, lots of mountains.

36-hour train to Severobaikalsk

Thirty-six hours, the longest so far. It was two-nights on a train with only two or three stops worthing to strech the legs outside. Buying same day ticket meant to go on kupe, 2nd class, which means closed compartiments of 4 berths. Beds are larger, softer and long enought for being stretched. In 3rd class, when doing it, people passing in the corridor would hit my feet.

We embark at 22:45, leaving at 23:00. From the beginning a young women, probably on the 30's, shares the compartiment. Her quite open t-shirt shows permanently her bra and soon after she puts on half transparent tights, with which she walks around in the train and its stops, showing all the drawings of the underware (not tanga, tough). The high-heeled shoes complete the description.

One hour later a mid-age women joins. I was already half asleep. This women talks more and next morning she tried some conversation to which I replied in my minimalist russian - where we are from, our strip so far and short terms plans. 

This trains takes us into the BAM line, paraller to the Trans-siberian, but North of the lake Baikal. This line was mostly built by Soviet prisioners working in concentration camps (gulags). The line was open only in 1991, same year as the Soviet dream come down.

Otheradvantages of kupe is that there are less people competing for the two toilets of the wagon and the provodnitsa are nicer, they even offered me a coffee in the morning, while I was in the corridor waiting my compartiment companions to wake up. 

About one hour away from the next big stop (+15min) the provodnitsa warns the toilet will be closed for 1h30. It's from 30 minutes before to 30 minutes after the stop, the so called hygienic zone. Eva was sleeping but our companions tell me that I should tell her. At same time one the mid-aged women starts to repaint her lips and eyes. For some Russian women seems important to be beautiful (in their way) for the duration of the stop, when everyone goes out of the train, who knows you will meet the person of your dreams (hopefully not buying beer or vodka).

As there is no restaurant wagon I bought a small dinner of smashed potatoes in the shop inside the station and bread from a women in the platform. The next long stop would be only in 12h, at 21:00.

During the dinner our companions also bought some dry noodles package and the middle aged person seems not to know how they work. Also next morning, 10minutes after the carriage attendant comes to announce the soon arrival - at 6:40am for arriving at 8:20 - and which I tryed to ignore, our companion (the other had left during the night) wakes me up saying that the toilets will close soon. But I knew they would not close before 7:50. We have been doing many more train rides in the past weeks than any average Russian person. But well, I got up and so I decided to have the brakfast still in the train.