Tiksi or Bust!

Last year, Joshua Hartshorne set out to explore

the vast open spaces of Central Siberia by river,

figuring it would be “easier than a car trip.”

It turned out to be harder than he expected.

This is his travel journal.

February 20

In 1917, following word of the February Revolution, political exiles in Irkutsk hopped on the next train to Moscow. Their brethren living along the northern Lena River, equally anxious to return to the action, could only wait for their watery road home to thaw in June.

It is 87 years later, and I find myself in opposite circumstances. My Irkutsk apartment is wallpapered with maps of Russia. Every day, with my finger I follow the long, winding blue line running from just north of Irkutsk to the Arctic Ocean. I am Arctic bound, but must wait for spring…

May 1

I’m starting to wonder if I will make it to the Arctic. I can’t get a schedule for the boats – this despite the fact I worked in the Siberian tourism business. When I finally tracked down the local river transportation office, they pleaded total ignorance of schedules and prices. A series of calls landed me at the ticket office in Lensk, which said they wouldn’t have a schedule until June.

Of course, that only gets me to Yakutsk, which is as far as the line from the South goes. Lena at the office is convinced that’s as far as it goes.

May 20

I tracked down a tour agency in Yakutsk with a schedule for ships bound to Tiksi, on the Arctic Ocean. Dmitry at the agency said that I will need “border-entry permission” for Tiksi. He can apply for it, but cannot guarantee success. I asked him to apply. He did not say anything about a fee, but there must be one. I asked him.

June 1

Lena at the Lensk office says the Lena is closed due to some sort of strike. Not good.

June 11

I get the schedule to Yakutsk from the people in Lensk. I can leave on July 7. I could not tell whether they said the strike is over or not. Speaking Russian on the phone is still difficult.

Dmitry the Yakutsk travel agent is a pain. He still has not confirmed that he has applied for my permission to go to Tiksi. Dmitry wants me to take some luxury cruise instead. I try to make him more pliant by mentioning I will be writing about this trip. Bad idea. He e-mails back: “If you are going to make an article or report for a newspaper, you have to submit your journalistic accreditation in Tiksi. I have to warn you – do not play with the frontier services.”

June 14

I e-mailed Dmitry to see if he could arrange visits to some of the museums in Yakutsk that require reservations. He replies, saying he has not applied for Tiksi yet, since I have not paid the fee. How many times did I ask about that fee?

I leave Irkutsk tomorrow for a project in the taiga. I don’t know how to wire money for Dmitry’s fee, and I have one afternoon to figure it out.

June 28

I have finished the taiga project and am in Severobaikalsk. I checked my e-mail. Dmitry has applied, but he doesn’t think I’ll get permission in time to take the July 7 boat to Tiksi. The next one is ten days after that, which is too late. At least the boats to Yakutsk seem to be running. I am taking the train to the river station at Ust-Kut tonight.

June 30

My first stop in Ust-Kut was the river station. I was in a rush to buy a ticket before they sold out. At the “ticket” counter, I was told: “No reservations. You can buy them on board the evening before departure starting at 8 pm.”

I arrived at the dock 7 pm tonight to cue up, and they were already selling tickets. It turns out they start whenever they want. I got a ticket.

July 1

I had no cause to worry about a sell out; the Krasnoyarsk steamed out of Ust-Kut half full at best, and they say this is as packed as it will get. I thought at first that this was just another example of Soviet-era inefficiency, like gigantic hotels with staff on every floor, but no guests. I was wrong.

I had not been on the boat long when a middle-aged steersman named Radik invited me into the cabin. He seemed excited to talk to a foreigner. They don’t get many. He showed me the river charts they used and explained how the buoys along the banks helped them steer.

I asked him if the boat was always this empty.

“Hah!” he replied. “It used to carry 500 passengers. Entire Gypsy troupes would take the boat.”

“How was that possible? There are only 160 berths.”

“People slept wherever they found space,” Radik explained. “What’s more, of the Krasnoyarsk’s three sister ships, there is now only work for one.”

Radik explained what happened to all the river traffic. The story is much the same across the Russian North: steady depopulation. Villages in the Russian Arctic are half the size they were in 1989. Government systems that enticed (through subsidies) and coerced (through GULAGs) settlers into the North have evaporated, and the people they brought have departed for the South, East or West. Radik spoke of closing factories. The only factory in this village closed; everyone left. The factory in that village closed, now there’s only one old dedushka who refuses to leave.

In the course of our conversation, Radik mentions we will arrive in Yakutsk on the fifth. The fifth?! When I bought the tickets, I was told we would land on the sixth, so that is when I made arrangements for housing.

July 2

Today we stopped at Kirensk. There is not much there, but I stocked up on Snickers bars and sent some letters. People live on both sides of the river, but there are no bridges anywhere on the Lena, so they have to take a ferry.

I have been asking around about when we will arrive in Yakutsk. The ticket-seller also thinks the fifth. Some people think it will be the seventh. The posted schedule says the boat will stop in Lensk and turn around. I don’t think anyone really knows.

This evening, Sergei, another steersman, invited me up to the cabin. “We’re approaching the Lena’s first tourist attraction,” he said, “The Lena Cheeks.”

The Lena Cheeks are a series of quick turns between steep bluffs. “The passage is too narrow for two boats to pass,” he said. “Before we had radios, an old man would sit at the top of the bluffs and signal to the ships below.”

Even with more sophisticated equipment, there are still problems, Sergei said. Just recently, a boat had made a wide turn, hit the cliffs and sank.

“Sank?” I asked. “Does that happen often?”

In fact, one of the Krasnoyarsk’s sister ships sank a few years back when it struck another boat, which had itself just sunk. Suddenly I was glad my cabin had a life vest. I had latched onto the river trip idea after reading in Russian Life and elsewhere how dangerous Siberian roads are. My schedule is tight enough; a sinking boat would rip a hole right through it. And help would certainly take a long time to get here. Even at the height of the North’s population, the Lena was never a crowded place. This whole day we have hardly seen anything: mostly the occasional shack or a small cluster of huts.

July 3

The ship’s horn woke me up this morning. We were at Peredui – at least, that is what the dock sign said. Then, a few hours later, we stopped at another Peredui. It turns out that the dock at the first village had been floated down from Peredui, and they just didn’t change the sign.

We stopped at Lensk today. Dmitry, who is in the cabin next to mine, was born there and planned to see some relatives. They didn’t know he was coming. When he knocked on the door, they weren’t there.

In the town, there was this fantastic, brand-new wooden church, built by Alrosa, the diamond concern. It is on the banks of the river. One of the steersmen said it is there to protect the town from floods. They said most of Lensk was destroyed a couple years ago in a huge flood. Dmitry said the town is hard to recognize, and not as cozy as before.

July 4

Today is River Mariner’s Day. The ship pulled over for two hours and lots of us swam in the Lena. It was really cold!

July 5

Today we passed the Lena Pillars. These are a long series of towering rock formations along the East bank of the river. It was something.

In the afternoon, we arrived in Yakutsk, almost. We are here, but apparently we cannot dock until tomorrow, so we have lowered anchor and will wait. There were not any mosquitoes in the middle of the river, but now that we are anchored near shore, the boat is swarming with them.

July 8

My first stop in Yakutsk was the travel agency, where I discovered the next voyage north had been postponed several days. No word on my documents.

My neighbor from the boat, Dmitry, who turns out to be a police officer, and my host – yet another Dmitry – spent the next several days in Yakutsk alternately sightseeing and arranging my documents. I was now going to be in Yakutsk for four days, meaning I needed to register my visa. At 11:30 am on the first day, we arrived at the Visa Registration Department to find a long, motionless line and a sign saying “Hours of Operation: 9 – 12.” The second day, we arrived earlier and noticed only then a sign saying “Be sure to have all paperwork already filled out.” No one in the line seemed to know what paperwork that would be or where to get it. We decided to give it a shot anyway.

The woman at the desk looked at my passport. “You,” she told me, “are here illegally.” I pointed out that my invitation from the Russian Ministry of the Interior specifically listed Yakutsk on my itinerary and that my visa was unrestricted in terms of cities I can visit. “If you want to travel,” she said, “you need a tourist visa. You have a business visa, and your employers have not given you permission to leave your place of employment.”

The Two Dmitrys argued rapidly in Russian. “Well,” the woman acquiesced, “since you are already here, we will see what we can do. I have to call Moscow for advice. We have never done this before. Come back at five.”

We spent the day at the one-of-a-kind Permafrost Institute. I suggested to the Dmitrys that perhaps it would be best just not to bother returning to the Visa Registration Department. I would be in Yakutsk illegally for only half a day. Besides, I doubted they would help and was half afraid they would arrest me when we arrived.

Dmitry the Police Officer agreed that I was unlikely to be discovered. “The police only check the documents of Chechens,” he said with some authority. “Still, they are doing a lot of work for us. Out of politeness, we should go back.”

Out of politeness, we arrived again at the Visa Registration Office at 5 pm. The woman we were waiting for, however, did not show up until a little after six. “Here is what we need,” she said when she arrived. “First, your host will need to prepare a series of documents demonstrating that there is actually room for you in his apartment. Then you will need a full medical clean bill of health, including a chest x-ray to show that you do not have tuberculosis… There is some other stuff, too. There is really no chance of you doing it all before your three days are up,” she concluded.

Dmitry the Police Officer thought it over. “How about we say, ‘To hell with the registration. We won’t register.’”

“That’s right,” the bureaucrat agreed. “To hell with the registration. Don’t register.”

That would seem to have been it, except that I still didn’t have my “border-entry permission.” Dmitry the Travel Agent had explained to the FSB (Security Forces) that I needed my permission to be granted by the ninth if it was to be useful, and they had said they would say one way or another by the seventh. When I arrived at the agency on the seventh, the travel agent explained that an FSB agent had visited, asking questions about me. He wanted to know what I had been doing in Irkutsk. How he knew I had been in Irkutsk at all, I still don’t know – I had never mentioned it to the travel agency.

Finally, word came that my permission had come through and I needed to go to the Border Police Office at the airport to pick it up, an expedition which involved hours of waiting.

Meanwhile, we speculated about what exactly the border police were doing in Tiksi while not granting permission for me to go there. After all, Tiksi isn’t actually on the border with anything but Polar Bear Land. So few foreigners travel through there, it is unlikely they were that busy. Dmitry’s travel agency had served some 400 visitors over the past year. Aaltje van Zoelen, of World Wise Ecotourism Network, has estimated that no more than 1,000 foreigners visit the entire Sakha Republic (roughly the size of India) each year.

Whatever it was the Tiksi border police spent their time doing, they did finally come through, and I had my permission.

When I complained about the insanity of it all, Dmitry the Host just laughed. “In the 80s, I worked in Tiksi,” he recalled. “I remember spending more time filling out my hotel registration than I spent in the hotel. You had to immediately register with the border police and then go to the airport to buy a return ticket. Then you went to the hotel to register. The bus only ran once every two hours and there were no taxis. Several times I traveled the 10 kilometers on foot. Then you had to go to the District Committee building for a hotel coupon, without which you would be sleeping on the street.

“It’s hard now,” he sighed, “to explain all the ridiculousness there was, and how incomprehensibly everything worked.”

It didn’t seem much more comprehensible now.

Incidentally, we found out why Dmitry the Police Officer could not find his relatives in Lensk. They had found out he was coming and went to the dock to look for him. They must have passed each other without knowing it.

July 9

When I arrived at the docks this morning to board my passage north, the loading area was teeming with families, all loaded down with every sort of provision: crates of vegetables, dining room sets, even linoleum – things that couldn’t be bought farther north. With river transport running only once every week and a half, it made sense to me that the ship would be crowded. Good thing I already had a ticket…

Not that it mattered. The crowd at the docks was there to help a much smaller group load their provisions. When we set off from Yakutsk, the Mekhanik Kulibin was as quiet as the Krasnoyarsk had been.

July 10

I have been spending my time playing my favorite card game, Durak, with the crew’s children. The crew has befriended me again.

I asked one, Marina, why the ship’s schedule changed.

“The ice up north still isn’t clear,” she replied. “Can you imagine it? It’s mid-July and the delta is still frozen.”

“Are we going to make it to Tiksi?” I wondered. Perhaps this would be an or-bust trip, after all.

“Well, the ice-breakers are working,” she shrugged. “If there’s still too much ice when we get there, we’ll dock on the closer side of the peninsula.” Tiksi, a now largely-defunct Soviet-era ocean port, is located on the ocean-facing side of a delta peninsula.

July 11

Marina seems to remember every foreigner to stray north of Yakutsk in the last decade – not that there have been many. One group, she recalled, had attempted entering Tiksi without proper documentation. “They were already in the city when the police checked their documents. They were forced to leave immediately. The next ship would not come for over a week, so they had to hike to a town farther south. That had been their plan all along, though, so it worked out okay.”

I told her about my struggle to get the pass. “Worst case scenario,” she considered, “you would have been forced to come back on the same boat.”

I sighed. My plan was to come back on the same boat. The Mekhanik Kulibin docks in Tiksi only once every 10 days, and there are no other passenger boats. Even if I had 10 days to kill, Dmitry the Host says there’s nothing to see in Tiksi.

There is one policeman onboard – a member of the river patrol, I think. We have been chatting occasionally. I’m tempted to demand he check my documents. I went to such lengths to get them; it will be a shame if they are never used.

The Mekhanik Kulibin does not dock like the Krasnoyarsk did. We put down anchor and people ferry back and forth in motorboats. There is always quite a crowd at the stops, many of whom do not seem to be meeting anyone or getting onboard. Maybe they are here for the entertainment. It is probably the most interesting thing that happens each week.

July 12

The river was plenty wide in Ust-Kut, and it has been expanding ever since. The last few days, it has resembled a sea sliding slowly across the flat table that forms the Sakha Republic’s northern geography. The only way to know that the days are passing, is to look at the clock or notice when the cafeteria opens and closes. The sun has not set since Yakutsk, and the decks are as sleepy and under-populated at midnight as at noon.

Like the Krasnoyarsk, the Mekhanik Kulibin pays little attention to the posted schedule, though it is half a day ahead rather than behind. I had wondered, looking at the low, thickly-vegetated islands sprinkled liberally across the Lena’s broad channel, whether I would even know once we reached the delta.

When we arrived, though, I knew. First, the air, miserably hot since we left Yakutsk, turned cool. Then chunks of ice appeared in the water. They multiplied, and soon the poor Kulibin was sailing across a Slurpee. The air was thick with the metallic rings of thousands of icy golf balls lapping against the ship’s hull.

“Are we going to make it to Tiksi?” I asked Marina hopefully. She shook her head. “The sea is still frozen. You can see it from here though.”

“Which direction?” I asked. The water is so broad now and the shores so distant and large islands so numerous that I had completely lost my bearings. Where the channel was that we had entered from, I could only guess.

Marina pointed to one of several open, ice-white expanses in the distance. “That’s it.” I took a picture. It is as close as I got.

We put down anchor on the wrong side of the peninsula. The crew readied the motorboat. Very few were disembarking, so I asked to take one of the empty seats. “Just to the shore and back,” I explained.

“Don’t dawdle,” the ship hand warned me. “As soon as we load, we leave.”

With all my baggage on board, I had no intention of ignoring his command. When the motorboat landed, I hopped out, stomped around on the mossy, treeless tundra for a few moments, then climbed back in. I had made it to the Arctic – mostly, anyway.

Now it was time to go back.   RL