Anyway.......
Misha called Lydia today in Vvenka. Lydia is our good friend who is closely
associated with Moolynaut, the old shaman. Lydia asked if it were possible
that I was possessed by some trickster spirit that was keeping me away from
Vvenka. I said that I didn't think so; to the contrary, I had been having a
lot of good fortune lately surrounding the trip and that it seemed to me that
the forces were in my favor.
Lydia wasn't convinced.
Apparently, Moolynaut knows a spell that will exorcise a spirit that inhabits a
person and brings bad weather to prevent that person from traveling. However,
to activate the spell she needs some baleen and she doesn't have any baleen.
Lydia and our friends Oleg and Sergei are racing around looking for baleen, so
we can get the show on the road.
The airport officials say that the planes will fly on Monday.
We'll see.

#2
It's March 21 and I'm still in the city of Petropavlovsk.
Yeah, I know that I've been a lot of talk about skiing and kiting across the tundra
and I'm just hanging in the city getting fat and lazy. Talk is cheap.
Yeah.
But the planes aren't flying, what can I do. According to
Misha: "The road where the plane comes down in Tillichiki, it is full of ice. They
have not a special machine to take this ice away. Actually, they have this special
machine but it not working. Crashed. Finished."
There's a rumor that this special machine will be not broken tomorrow. Then
we can go. Am I waiting to start the trip or am I on the trip. I don't know.
You tell me.

Jon

#3
March 22
It's a beautiful spring day, sunny, about 0 Celsius, and the plane hasn't flown yet
and I'm still in Petropavlovsk. Actually the snowplow in Tillichiki isn't crashed
but the snowplow operator is. He's gone hunting, or he's drinking vodka, or
watching TV, but he's not plowing the runway. The word on the street is that he
does this on occasion. There are three flights a week to Tillichiki on three
different days on three different airplanes.
But it's a bother to open the airport on three different days. It's a lot of work.
So when he feels like NOT working, then
he shuts the airport for six days. Then he opens the airport one day and lets all
three airplanes land. Today is Tuesday. If he keeps this plan going, we'll fly
tomorrow. However another big storm is forecast for tonight. So we'll see.
Earlier I wrote about the madness of modern Russia. Perhaps you didn't
believe me. Well, the country has grown dramatically out of the ashes of the
Soviet system and the economic collapse of Perestroika. But now I am face to
face with a feudal lord who's fiefdom is the airport in Tillichiki and the
planes will fly when he damn well is ready for them to fly.

#4
March 25, Village of Vvenka

latitude 600 11' longitude 1650 28'



Finally the planets that determine the quirky Siberian airplane schedule lined up
and we escaped our prison in Petropavlosk. Misha and I had been stuck, waiting for
our flight for over a week and I was antsy verging on homicidal. We landed in
Tilichiki, a small town on the east coast of Kamchatka, but the real point of take
off for this crazy wander is the tiny Koryak village of Vvenka. The only way to get
there is a four-hour snowmobile ride south of the airport.

Near the runway I spotted Sergei and Oleg dressed in sealskin mukluks, deerskin
pants, boxy canvas anoraks, and hats with top corners that stand up like dog's ears.
Their faces were grim, they had just barely made it. After a winter of
record-breaking cold and snow, it had suddenly turned way warm. Sergei's honking,
Russian-made Boran snowmachine had just about sunk through the ice into the Vvenka
River. The frozen river is our highway to the village.

We hung in Tilichiki until midnight and snowmobiled into the Vvenka the next
morning. Oleg's wife Lydia met us at the front door. She picked off a bit of lint
from each of our coats, and burned them in the shovel full of burning coals. Got to
get rid of the evil spirits you know. Maybe it worked, it's down to -6 C so we will
head north for Nikolai's reindeer camp in the morning.



#5

April 2, 2004

Finally we are really on the trip. We traveled with Oleg and Sergei to Nicolai's
reindeer camp, but they had to hustle back to Vvenka because the weather is so weird
that they were afraid that they might make it back. Now we are struggling toward
Talovka on our own which feels pretty good for a change. Just me, Misha and an
infinity of tundra. Last week it was so warm that the rivers were breaking up, but
this week we've been battling -20 C and swirling blizzards that make it hard to see
the black ice at our feet. Just one more of the enigmas of Siberian travel, even
though we are in a horrendous blizzard there's hardly any snow so we've been forced
to trudge over frozen-solid, hummocky tundra. All of our appropriate technology,
like the kites and skis are banging along behind us in our sleds. The gear is
getting a terrible thrashing. We are crawling like ants through the Siberian
wilderness, lucky to make 5 miles a day. At this rate it will be two more long days
until we reach the small village of Talovka.

About 4 o'clock this afternoon we spotted a strange boat-like cabin on the horizon.
This didn't make sense to me but we pushed on. Turns out that we've reached the
Penzinski River. The cabin is on a boat that must have gone aground a while ago,
but the stove still works so we've fired it up. Finally the sat phone is warm
enough to send out this dispatch. It's going to be a long strange trip and the
Arctic Ocean seems impossibly far away. Misha and I decided that we'll just keep on
going and see what we find next in this land of extremes. If it warms up I'll keep
you posted.

Jon Turk



#6

April 5, 2004

Village of Talovka

We'll we've made it to civilization of a sort. Talovka is a tiny Koryak village
where a few people manage a hardscrabble existence. It's pretty amazing that they
get by, no roads, boats, or airplanes to connect them to the rest of the world. An
occasional helicopter stops by but that's become very rare since the fall of the
USSR. The mayor insists that we stay at his house. All the people are warning us
that we in for a super-early break up which means that we will run out of ice and
snow much earlier than usual. Our high-tech kites and skis won't make very good
boats for crossing all of the big rivers that we planned to use as highways. This
trip seems to get stranger and stranger. Maybe there really was a bad spell that
the baleen didn't fix.

Both Misha and I are wondering about making it to the Arctic Ocean. Our five miles
a day average isn't really cutting it. All the villagers keep telling me about a
guy named Dimitri who vanished for good while traveling under similar conditions.
So tomorrow we will head for another reindeer camp 80 kilometers away. The reindeer
birthing starts soon, so we can hang out with the herders who stay with the herd 24
hours a day to keep the wolves away. This will give us time to consider our
situation from all angles. I don't really know who is driving this journey, it
doesn't seem to be me. I guess I'll just see where the force leads me.

Jon Turk

Follow a Shamans Dream across Siberia
Part VII
Part VI
Part V
Part IV
Part III
Part II
Part I and Interview with Jon