Tag Archives: russia

It was farewell to what is possibly the world’s remotest hotel complex, and off we choppered south to our next Kamchatkan volcanic wonder – Kizimen (pronounced KizEEmen). And here she is – the view from the south:

And from the north ->

What differentiates this particular volcano of Kamchatka from others are the two lakes at its foot set among wonderfully “designer” landscapes. There’s also the amazing view of nearby Kronotsky volcano – here on the horizon to the right, upon which you can meditate for an eternity.

Read on…

Hi all!

As per my chokka, ongoing business-trip schedule, I recently found myself down in Sochi where we had our 12^th conference dedicated to industrial cybersecurity. Every year the industrial topic gets all the more popular, while our exhibition gets all the more large. Nearly 450 guests were in attendance this time – meaning we wouldn’t have all fitted into last year’s venue; accordingly, the view out the window was a little different to the usual one:

I kicked things off to a packed hall (just how I like it) ->

Read on…

What with several business trips the world over since the spring, plus a few Kamchatka-2024 posts already sneaking onto these here blog pages of mine, you might think that my tales from the extreme-north side (our Yakutsk-Tiksi-Yakutsk road expedition) could be over. How wrong you’d be!…

But even I admit that it’s been a while since my last Tiksi-post. Accordingly, quick rewind to where I left you months ago…

I left you with our having left Tiksi heading back in the direction of Yakutsk just before Tiksi was cut off completely for over a week due to a particularly intense arctic blizzard, and our realizing that we were waaaay ahead of schedule – as in: we’d be back in Yakutsk in half the time we’d planned; yes – a full 10 days earlier!

So what were we to do? Arrive back earlier and that was that? Of course not. No, instead, we decided to head back toward Ust-Nera and investigate much more closely Indigirskaya Truba – the Indigirka Tube. Well why not? After all, we’d plenty of time, and – more importantly – the naleds there were fully frozen, thus posing no danger…

// What’s the Indigirka Tube? Find out here.

So – back to Ust-Nera it was. Not that it felt much like our second time in as many weeks on this expedition, since the snowstorm had changed how the landscape looked so much. Here it is two weeks earlier ->

And here’s the exact (see the same road signs?!) same spot after the storm:

Onward – through the only-barely-cleared road – the Kolyma Highway…

Read on…

The time has finally come to lift the curtain on something I’ve only been mentioning in passing while writing these here Yakutsk-Tiksi-Yakutsk expedition posts: the where-we-stayed situation up inside the Arctic Circle and in just-as-cold other areas of Yakutia…

In the smallest of nutshells, the situation is as follows:

• There are places to stay – but often they’re nothing like hotels or guesthouses
• A hot shower isn’t guaranteed
• A toilet is guaranteed – and it’s not always outside!
• The range of comfort levels couldn’t be broader – from dossing down on floors of town-halls or school sports halls, or sleeping in our vehicles (ugh), to the relative (for permafrosted locations) luxury of decent hotel in a city; like the Tygin Darkhan in Yakutsk ->

Tiny nutshell – done. The rest of this post: details…

Read on…

Today’s portion of Yakutsk-Tiksi-Yakutsk expedition took us from Topolínoye on the winter road to the Kolyma Highway, and along the latter for a short stretch until our next overnight stay – in the village of Tyoply Klyuch (Warm Springs). The road was smooth and wide, the views – exceptional:

Read on…

In my previous post, I left you with us in the middle of nowhere on the Yana Highway (on our Yakutsk-Tiksi-Yakutsk expedition)…

So why did we stop here? Because we wanted another look at a place we’d seen here back in 2021 – among the last few remains of what was once a Gulag forced-labor camp – a barrack surrounded by two barbed-wire fences, plus a watchtower. It’s a symbol of a dark chapter of history of the country – one that needs to be known and remembered. I think the place should be preserved and protected until one day it becomes a valuable artifact of history and a museum of the Gulag.

Read on…

Ahead of us – taking the incredibly picturesque (permanent, but not asphalted) road from the village of Topolinoye roughly south all the way to the Kolyma Highway, and then hanging a right (westward) and back to Yakutsk. That was the plan, anyway…

Read on…

Not far (20 minutes on snowmobiles) from the 70-kilometer road between Verkhoyansk and Batagay, there’s a unique natural phenomenon that goes by the name of the Batagaika crater ->

Apparently it formed as a result of a combination of global warming and certain actions of Soviet Homo sapiens – those certain actions being cutting down the trees in the surrounding area, plus the making of ruts by heavy all-terrain vehicles (used during the deforestation). This eventually led to the permafrost thawing, becoming a ravine, and then spreading out, giving us today this here bizarre massive tadpole-shaped depressed formation on the Siberian plains:

Read on…

In the previous post, I left you with us leaving Tiksi earlier than planned. We left earlier to avoid the coming storm, which could have seen us stranded in Tiksi for more than a week. Now, Tiksi is a wonderful place, but staying there for a week+ sure wasn’t in our plans. We all agreed: “Let’s get the hell out of here!” And that’s just what we did – on the winter road back the way we came…

We left at 4pm – just in time for the sunset:

Read on…

Read on…