Cheetah

This update will not include pictures, on account of the brokenness of our camera. I think it's still on warranty, I just hope we haven't done anything to void it... Anyway, we're in this totally surreal town of Chita. First some back story: we caught the train from Yekaterinburg to Irkutsk, and then a bus from Irkutsk to Listvyanka, which is this tourist town on the Baikal. We lived there for two days with this five crazy Poles who are on a break from school and decided to go camping in Mongolia, in the Gobi Desert, for 2 weeks. Good luck to them... anyway, we did the hiking around the Baikal, Russian Banya, beating one another with birch branches thing, until it became apparent that this one Mafia family, with which we found ourselves unpleasantly entangled, controlled the whole town...so we left earlier than we had planned and caught a train to the town of Slyudanka. Irkutsk is an extremely Chinese town: all the signs and ads are in Chinese, and all the cars have the driver on the other side. From Slyudyanka there was no choice but to hitch the 400-odd kilometers to Ulan Ude. We caught a ride with this crazy Australian Father-son team: the son was an investment banker, and had motorcycled from South Africa to England, worked there for two years, bought a Land rover, and then, together with his father, was driving to Bejing. They didn't speak a word of Russian, and had driven all the way accross Kazakstan, accidentally through Mongolia, back again, and were headed from Irkutsk to Ulan Bator, via Ulan Ude. Their land rover broke somewhere in Kazakstan, and there are no parts available, so the 400 kilometer journey was accomplished in two days, at a speed of 20 kilometers per hour. We slept in their extra tent, and showered in this river, so the whole situation wasn't that bad. Ulan Ude means Bloody Gates in Buriat, which is the label of a group of north Mongolian dialects. They have been 'voluntary' members of the Russian Empire since 1703. We learned a lot about the area and its history from a buryat woman we met on the marshrutka (marche-route-ka) from Ulan Ude to our current location, Chita. We met her because she handed me a bunch of change as we were driving out of Ulan Ude, saying 'pass it to them'. The ride cost 700 rubles, so them couldn't be the driver: turns out that she's a devout follower of some Mongolian variant of Buddhism, which is the dominant religion in this area, and that the change was to be thrown out the window to some kind of holy place. According to her, Ulan Ude and Ulan Batar are so named because of the river Ulan. Ulan means 'red' or 'bloody', in this case referring to some kind of massacre of the Buryat at the hands of the cossaks under the command of the Tsar. Baatar or Bator means the same thing as богатырь, sort of 'warrior' or 'paladin'. 'Ude' means 'gates'. There seems to be a good deal of resentment towards Moscow out here, although there doesn't seem to be any kind of a serious separatist movement, which the woman we met explained in terms of there being only half a million Buryat on earth. This far out in Siberia, the majority of the population are Lithuanians, Poles, Cossaks from Rostov-na-Donu, and Decemberists, for reasons that should be obvious to students of Russian history. There really seems to be a feeling here that everyone wants to leave, or in other terms, as if this place is still a place of exile. Because of the various paperwork issues with registration and other difficulties, it is just as hard for an ordinary person to move to western Russia now as it was when this area was all Gulags. We have had some truly psychotic conversations with illiterate locals who blame America, solely, for the holocaust, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the poverty of Russia, the brain drain, and the fact that they cannot escape Chita. There are some forest fires in the area, so the whole town is hot but choked in smoke, lending it an extremely surreal appearence. Americans are universally regarded as spies out here, and when people overhear our speaking English, the look at us as if we were a combination of James Bond and a freak in a circus. We're taking off in a few hours for Belogorsk. It probably isn't on any map that y'all have access to, it's by Manchuria and its population is something like 10,000. It's near (500 kilometers), to Birobidzhan, the capital of the second Israel, the Jewish autonomous region (kinda like Warsaw, 1944, was a Jewish Autonomous City). Onward and upward!