October 12, 2026
Overnight stays on a Sayan Oka rafting trip – with a surprising, quirky cultural layer.
Today’s post is all about the campsites we stayed at on our summer rafting trip down the Sayan Oka River, of which there are many and in different flavors, but which all turned out to be decent. Even though there was a pretty heavy stream of rafting tourists (every day we crossed paths with one, two, or three groups), and on top of that fishermen started showing up farther downstream (they come upriver in motorboats through some fairly rough riffles), we always found a nice little spot to spend the night.
Sometimes it was in a forest:
And very nice they were too:
Other times we stayed on river islands – amid rocks and ants:
But each spot was still great – made even more great by the addition of our portable banya each time!
Here’s a funny thing. Some campsites turn into makeshift “museums of rafting tourism” of sorts. Since the river does the carrying and nobody has to lug anything on their back, rafters sometimes bring all manner of junk to these “river museums”. And as a result, pretty little clearings end up with a rather peculiar “cultural layer”:
On the tree on the left there’s a British license plate. What? How?!
Well, I suppose this tire could have floated here on its own. If not… how did they hoist it up there?
And how did this get up there? In case you can’t quite make it out, it’s a living-room multi-bulb ceiling light fitting!…
AKA – a chandelier!
Like anywhere – Big Brother’s watching. Wait… WHAT?! ->
The things you see around here…
The volleyball is ours. But we fished it out of the river fair and square – it was floating along all by itself on some business of its own, but ended up right here:
In fact, these Rafters’ Museums are a fairly common phenomenon. For example, here’s a similar place at the confluence of the Katun and Argut rivers in Altai, where I’ve been a whopping… three times already!
And then there’s this off-the-wall modern-kunsty installation at the campsite just upstream of the Shyoki rapids on the Ka-Khem River (the Little Yenisei):
A good campsite saves the day if gloomy, rainy weather suddenly closes in:
You sit under the tarps listening to the raindrops drumming on them…
Or you just zonk out, stocking up on some sleep for the days ahead:
And when the rain stops, you can even do a little fishing.
Meanwhile, the rafts get a day-off too.
But the weather was clearing up – time to push on!…
