Vodka, love and no shaman  

(story from Republic of Tuva, Russia)

I spent the last night in Krasnoyarsk at Nikolai’s…After my naive attempt to get on board of a vessel sailing the 1500km stretch of the Yenisei river from Krasnoyarsk all the way to Norilsk failed. It was one of those unimportant yet memorable nights fulled by vodka, Anstafyev and Alexei Jaskin. The sense of failure of last few days was overridden by the anticipation of my trip to Tuva to find the roots of Siberian shamanism. And so with a huge hangover and a head filled with useless information about a writer and an ice hockey player I boarded the train to Abakhan.
The train journey was what I needed. After leaving Krasnoyarsk the train track began to gently wind up and down through heavily wooded hillsides, leaving behind the monotony of the Siberian tundra. I was sharing the whole night carriage with only one other occupant. After the packed carriages of the trans Siberian magistrale this felt like balsam on my mind. There was no vodka, no fish flavoured air and no loud teenage soldiers travelling far from home to full fill their duties, only me and the other occupant, a woman. She looked different from the usual women of eastern Russia. I remember thinking she might be a foreigner. She sat by a window and watched the forest roiling by for hours, in absolute silence. I felt shy to speak or approach her and remember how strange it felt to be in the whole carriage, quietly rattling through these dark endless woods, with another person, a woman, acknowledging each other presence yet not talking. 

We arrived to Abakhan very early in the morning. The sun just risen behind the periphery of this provincial town and I stood on the deserted train station platform with Lena. The woman from my train carriage. We both looked a bit lost so I asked where she was going and she said to Tuva. I said that was where I was going too and that was it, we were going to Tuva together. 

I did not need to wait long to figure what kind of company Lena will be. We left the bus station and Lena waved down the first Zhiguli car on the sleepy morning road and before I knew it we were getting off in a village and heading for a swim in the icy cold Yenisey river. We arrived back to Abakan quite late. I thought we would have to spent a night in there before we travel to Kyzyl, capital of Tuva but Lena had different plans and with the sun setting we were squeezed between couple of vodka drinking Tuvinians in a Lada car heading off to the capital of Tuva Republic. It’s 400km from Abakan to Tuva and it takes about 7 hours in a car. The road zigzags through the wild Sayan mountains. But I did not see anything, I wouldn’t have even if we’d driven during the day. I didn’t see anything because I passed out. The vodka from the Tuvinians found me.
I was shaken and woken up at the Tuvinian border by a Russian border officer, questioned and forced to drink another vodka. To toast on Czechoslovakia. Next thing I remember was still dark and a grumpy receptionist in a hotel on a ground floor of a prefab in Kyzyl. Lena doing all the talking for me. Grumpy receptionist giving a quizzical look and then an old barren room with 2 simple beds and a functionalist painting of a factory on a sun bleached socialist wallpaper.

Lena woke me up early. She wanted to go out and roam, eager to explore, have an adventure. I tried hard to figure my new companion out and asked who she was but she wasn’t giving anything away. I thought she had secrets but it was just her, she never said much. The only think I somehow pieced together was that she was from Moscow, kept a high profile job and was quite mad, good mad. 

We went to explore Kyzyl. The city seemed a bizarre mix of Russian prefabs scattered in amongst wooden houses and vast squares connected with dirt track roads. You could see folk icons and shaman references next to the adverts for new Lada cars or Russian fashion icons. In the evening we went to the outskirts of Kyzyl where the last prefab of the city ends and taiga starts. Lena got to talk to a bunch of vodka drinking characters in a circular place resembling a taxi rig. After some heated exchange she turned to me and asked to land her my map. One of the men put his index finger on a vast and remote area of forest and Lena turned to me and said: ‘The UVazik is leaving at eight, hurry we have to get our backpacks from the hotel’. In the next hour or so we were sardined at the back of an archaic UVAZ on the way to one of the most remote parts of Tuva, Toora Kham. 

The journey took all night and was particularly demanding on my bones. There was no road to Tore Cham just a dirt track through the taiga. We stoped midway at midnight at a wooden log cabin housing couple of weathered hunters. Everyone had a dram and cigarette and than I woke up with sunrise on a river bank. The UVAZik came to a halt in thick forest on the banks of the Yenisey river. It was cold and mist was rolling out from the river. The driver made fire to keep us warm.

 I asked what we were waiting for and the driver said we wait for a boat to take a couple of us at a time across the river. There wasn’t a timetable. The boat came once every odd morning to meet the UVazik. The boat was a simple wooden canoe for 8 with a gas propeller engine. Once on the other side we walked for couple of miles through the taiga until we reached an opening and suddenly the view of Tore Cham opened up to us. It was very picturesque, mist coming up from the ground along with the sun. Some chimneys already puffing. 

When we got closer to the village we started noticing people laying about the unpaved roads and paths, in the grass. They were mostly asleep and dressed. There were empty bottles of vodka scattered all around. This was eerie. We asked the villagers we walked with from the boat where we could stay and were directed to the villages mayor. He was already up and offered us breakfast. He asked what we were doing there and Lena explained we were tourists and going to lake Azas. This was the first time I’d heard about lake Azas. He then asked to speak with Lena in private. When Lena came back she lit up a cigarette, exhaled and said: ‘People don’t like Moscovian here so from now on we are both from Czechoslovakia. You start conversations and when I see it’s safe I join. We are staying here tonight and we get a lift to lake Azas first thing in the morning‘ I said ‘da’ as I struggled to find something more coherent than da. I felt excited yet apprehensive as this adventure started to have a bit of an unhinged feel to it.

We had a day to kill and Lena was keen to get out and roam. The sun was up and the village looked different now under the morning light and the fog gone. Not better, it looked run down, and quite surreal too. There were empty bottles scattered everywhere, and wrecks of agricultural machinery and cars on the outskirts. It wasn’t the people’s debris and waste that made Toora Kham feel surreal it was the people themselves. They were mostly drunk. Some lying around on the grass trying to start conversations with Lena and me stepping in with a phrase about coming in peace from Czechoslovakia. Czechoslovakia seemed to do the charm. Not that anybody knew, it just sounded good. Foreign yet ‘more Russian then Western’ and too long to ask for a repeat. Invitations to toast our newly found brotherhood came thick and fast and I did not mind, I enjoyed being constantly semi drunk. It helped me not to focus and just follow the flow, or Lena in this story. 

We spent the day washing clothes in the Yeanisay river and stocking up on food in a tiny local shop. The shop had 4 walls (most shops do). The first was for canned fish and cooking oil. Second bread, third was cheap Russian vodka and forth local unlabelled one. We bought a bit of all and got some vegetables from under the counter. The night at Toora Khem was fine even though I slept on the ground and had another dream about another place that doesn’t exist.
Next day morning we saw the sun rising above Toora Khem again, this time we left it behind entering the Taiga in the opposite direction. In the direction we headed were no more villages just lakes, mountains and the taiga. 

We arrived to lake Azas late in the afternoon after a bumpy ride over the forests undergrowth. The driver of the UVAZ was called Alexandr and his son was Anatoly. They were ethnic Russians going to get the fish from the fisherman and hunters living on the shores of lake Azas. They were good people. Anatoly said his dad never touches vodka and he added then said to Lena they will make sure we have a place to stay and are safe before they leave. 

After arriving we found ourselves being hosted by the fisherman outside of their hut, eating smoked fish, drinking vodka and toasting to Czechoslovakia. Then Lena asked her usual all plans changing question: ‘And what is the wooded bob in the middle of the lake there?’. The fishermen said it was a tiny island called the Bear island. They said the bears often rest there when they swim across the lake. There was a sense of inevitability in the air before Lena asked again: ‘Can you take us there?’

How many times I started a new paragraph in the story by: ‘and before I knew it’.. well just like that I stand on a tiny island in the middle of the Siberian lake while Lena is emphasising her last sentence to the leaving fishermen: ‘Don’t forget, after 4 days!’
I am standing on a shore of a 50x100 metres Bear island with a bag of tatties, under counter vegetables, borrowed fishing rod, bottle of vodka, single man tent and no shaman whatsoever but a woman I’ve only just met and I am falling in love with. I sign, take it all in and reach for the bottle.