I have been there!

Age does not incline towards romantic, or too emotional attitudes, so, when meeting a lot of superlatives in texts about Kamchatka I used just to hem. Superlatives do not work in this over-advertising world. Yet, in this case they are just a helpless attempt to express something which is beyond your scope...

The forewords to one photo book about Kamchatka warns: "No picture can convey the unexpected, out of the way beauty of this land". It is not altogether true, yet the thing is to convey it you have to be an exceptionally good photographer, an artist. One is easily caught by the obvious: volcanoes, geysers, bears, salmon. And if a volcano erupts and a bear catches salmon, taking photographs of this you inevitably fall into a boring rut...

Day 1

Volcano ash clouds.

The plane was shearing the tops of the clouds which filled the space among three or four conical mountains, then dived into the white fog. Chris sitting next to me remarked: "I hope the pilot has done it before"...

You know what the girl-interpreter who met us at the tiny airport did for her living? Translated information-letters about Kamchatka volcano ash clouds (dangerous to planes' engines) to the organizations responsible for aviation safety.

Day 3

Kronotsky Reserve. Stocking up fish.

A nice clear stream we were walking along proved to be a bottomless source of excellent (and absolutely free) food. Our guide (and one of the senior inspectors of the Reserve)took out of his pocket a roll of line with a red spoon-bait and in 20 minutes a dozen of beautiful salmons lay in a heap on the sand. His son, a boy of 17, too excited over the process, entreated his father to go on. "Do not forget where you are", was the calm answer. We got about a kilo of red caviar, which had to be processed fast. Unlike angling, this work the lazy boy did not like, so the next morning the caviar, unprocessed, went into another stream. It had to be done not to invite bears with its smell.

Day 5

In a thick mist we lost our way in the moonlike desert of Krasheninnikov volcano. When the mist rose we found we had been walking in the wrong direction. We turned and in about an hour got to our pass, leading to Kronotsky lake. Looking down at it, I was standing on the saddle unable to move, eat and drink. God, just think we might not have lost the way, would have been here an hour earlier, in the mist and I would never see it...Later in the evening it occurred to me I had seen something like that before. Yes, in Scotland, but the North Sea and the island had looked much more ascetic, austere. And then there had been neither white-headed Kronotsky volcano nor rich forests. And no bears you had to warn off with constant noise when moving through bushes.

Days 7

Pristine taiga in a vast valley, light and easy to walk through, even though the vague path is not of much help. And the exquisite silhouette of Kronotsky following our progress, always behind, misty at dusk, white-headed, clear and proud at dawn. And highly likely not a human soul within a distance of two days' walk.

Day 9

An unforgettable experience: crossing bands of creeping bushes of Elfin Cedar. I cannot imagine an obstacle to a trekker with a rucksack more efficiently sucking his strength and driving him mad than these thick and springy branches fanning from horizontal to vertical. After you have broken through this, climbing up a steep rocky stream bed is felt like a well earned rest... The saddle of the pass was like a border between soft, green, fragrant valley and a dry volcanic desert. The thick white smoke coming from the side of Kizimen volcano, gloomy, ugly, forbidding, looked so out of place that you could not take your eyes from it.

Days 10-12

The "Tumroks" tour base, half a dozen wooden cottages and a helicopter pad, a haven of civilization nestling among exquisitely shaped and thoroughly arranged mountains covered with rich taiga. And heaven on earth: hot bath, fed by a spring coming from the mountain side. There is only one path connecting the "Tumroks" with the outer world. It is 32km, a day's walk up and down through taiga and high tundra to the head of the rough track leading to Lazo village, and if an expedition truck does not wait for you there, another day's walk to the village itself...

Some local hunters had joined our group, and at one particular turn of the path I saw one of then with a big fish writhing in his hands raised above the head. Amidst dense wild taiga! And only when I came closer I could see a tiny but deep and clear stream by his feet, from which the salmon evidently had been extracted. Nobody volunteered to carry the additional 3kg, so the fish went back to the water and up to its spawning place.

Day 13

The expedition truck, we were following along the rough and narrow forest road, stopped, its two drivers came out and stood, inspecting something ahead. My Dutch, ever eager to inspect everything, followed suite, descended into the dry ravine under a bridge, which was the object of inspection, and saw the problem. Some of the tree trunks forming the right side of the bridge were half broken and sunk considerably. Evidently that had happened long ago, for the bridge was covered with a thick layer of packed earth which seemed to keep the whole thing in one piece. The drivers of the first truck got in their vehicle, it roared, dived and climbed up to the other side. Our driver crossed himself and did the same... Just think, the road was the only relatively short way to the fantastic roof of Kamchatka, Klyuchevskoi Group. And for more than ten years they talk about turning the peninsula into a tourist paradise, an East Switzerland, about making its small population happy and prosperous. And the plain fact is the latter could very comfortably live off salmon and tourism...

Day 15

There were two helmets and gas-masks on the shelf of the volcanologists' hut under Bezymyany volcano. The room inside was fairly adequate for 14, yet, except two members (plus the guides of course), the others preferred tents. High wind was whipping the Sahara-like spaces, raising clouds of fine dust and tearing at the tents. How could they survive three nights in these drums I do not know! The mysterious Dutch soul...

On its top Bezymyany offered a good view of Klyuchevskoi and Kamen, and in the opposite direction gracefully spaced the masses and cones of Ovalnaya Zimina, Bolshaya Udina and Tolbachik. Bezymyany itself claims the mightiest eruption of the 20th century (in 1956). You cannot but believe the volcanologists, you can see the whole side of the volcano torn off by the explosion, but your mind refuse to picture t h a t explosion, which threw millions of tons of stones as far as 40 kilometers...

The area is a lost world where a couple of hours' walk does not change noticeably the scenery, but, thanks to incredible lava outcrops, "kekurs", you are never bored in this desert. We were lucky with weather, so walked rather long distances without problem, yet mist or low cloud will certainly put your navigating skills to a serious test. But even with good maps and guide and trek-leader (such as we had, a first-rate man from NKBV, Arnoud ten Haaft) you should not take chances - in case of accident a helicopter will not be available in bad weather and it is two days of fast walking to the nearest towns of Kozyrevsk and Klyuchi.

Bears

It is OK, you are doomed to see them. Probably not nearby, but then one should not forget it is a huge, fast and unpredictable animal. I for one did not mind a safe distance of 100-150m between us. When walking, two guides, leading and bringing the rear, always had a special fire-cracker and a powerful pepper spray. When moving through thick bushes we tried to make as much noise as we could to warn them off.

Geysers Valley

Of course, a visit there is worth all the trouble and money for those who believe that our world, the best of all the worlds, is just a thin crust of earth above the abyss of boiling lava. In the Valley they can get a thorough satisfaction with their rightness. As to me, I have never believed in that (and will never do), so all the visible and audible proofs they go for to the Valley, did not move my imagination. A cauldron of boiling water is not the sight which can impress me deeply, unless it feeds a bath, delicious after a long and sweaty walk... Probably for that I have to thank the industrial site not far from my home where some permanently broken heating devices produce a lot of white steam and even a sort of minor geysers with day-and-night spurting and hissing.

Avachinsky volcano

When we reached the rim of the crater I forgot all my skepticism about the "volcano-appeal", a lot of them (but not all of course) being more ugly than beautiful. The scene was perfect in its aesthetical appeal. That was a paragon of the right volcano - the round crater filled up to the brim with the black jumble of cold lava. Warm in fact, for there was no snow on that sheer blackness. The yellow furnace of the fumarole was furiously feeding the crisp clear air with white sulphuretted hydrogen. My guys did everything short of jumping into it to take pictures at all possible angles and to chip off pieces of sulphur... To this fun you can add the 360* view of the neighbouring volcanoes, green taiga and tundra, the blue Pacific melting into the sky and far down small and beautiful at this distance Petropavlovsk... Yes, that volcano was a perfect finishing touch of the journey never to be forgotten.

Last but not least

People.

Living on a far-away island (there is no way to get to the mainland other than 3 days by sea, or 2hr by plane) will most certainly make a stamp on your mentality. There it is the mentality of frontier people. Our guide in the Kronotsky Reserve did not have any personal trekking equipment worth mentioning except a rucksack. At least according to the West standards. He thought nothing of walking with heavy rucksack through the Kamchatka wilderness wearing soft sneakers with smooth plastic soles. Amazing, but for 12 days he managed not to twist ankles and evidently did not fear that. Agile like a cat, fast and indefatigable, he survived on several spoonfuls of porridge, handful of dry fruit and plate of soup in the evening. Born in St.-Petersburgh, well educated, he came to Kamchatka just for a summer trek - not to come back, to become a tour-operator, guide, a businessman, one of the senior staff of the Kronotsky Reserve.

The tenacity of these people is amazing. The hunting, fishing, driving and guiding stories I heard there were truthful, but not always easy to believe. Camping for warmth near a huge boulder red hot inside, just fallen off Klyuchevskoi volcano is a minor one. Another one, more serious, about a truck sunk in the Pasific (in winter, through the ice) about 100m from the coast. Its owner, a free-lance expedition driver, (the one, who brought us to Klyuchevskoi area) spent two months to get it back - alone. Only for the day, when the truck was actually tugged from the water, a tractor had been brought from the nearest village about 40km away... It should be noted the water at the Kamchatka coasts, even at the peak of summer, is hardly likely to grow warmer than 5-6C.

Near these people I felt overcivilized, weak and effeminate, rather client than a guide.