Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky again

August 26–30, 2007

In the two years since my last trip around Russia’s Far East there’s been a marked improvement in all of the cities I visited. Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, Khabarovsk, Vladivostok, they’re all flourishing, growing and glowing. Meanwhile, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky is still just as shit. In two years not a single thing has changed.

My dream was to fly to the valley of geysers, but it was not meant to be this time around because the weather conditions were not helicopter-friendly.

The clouds dispersed briefly, revealing views of a distinctive local feature — smokestacks, hard at work by moonlight.

Not a single new restaurant has opened in the city in two years. Nothing’s changed in the existing ones either — even the tablecloths are exactly the same.

They’re still hanging washing out to dry in the street, in between houses. They come to an arrangement with their neighbours across the way, attach pulleys, then take turns putting out their washing.

The locals live in anticipation of an earthquake that just won’t come. This has, however, had a positive knock-on effect on the architecture. The building on the left has lovely projection windows — they’re there strictly for the purposes of buttressing transversal resilience, not because they look nice. Every apartment in the building on the right has an earthquake-resistant ledge leading out onto a microbalcony, known in common parlance as the captain’s bridge.

Almost all of the traffic lights sit impractically close together on welded zigzags.

They still hang up whatever takes their fancy on traffic light posts.

The only novel detail in the entire city — from time to time you see homebrew telescopic traffic light posts.

To top it all off you also come across these sorts of gems:

At one of the intersections I discovered a button, which you have to push to get the lights to switch to the green man. Amazingly enough, everywhere else in the world this button doesn’t come with a light attesting to the fact that the button is actually working. You press it, but you can never be entirely sure whether your request has been heard, and so you weave your way through the traffic, following which the green man finally lights up — in vain.

Advertisements for dummies are stationed throughout the city.

United Russia — Putin’s Party!

This is what would happen if you gave Kandinsky contact paper:

In debt?
Have some self-respect
Pay your rent

All of the petrol stations are open-air. We stumbled upon one with an awning over the petrol pumps, except that it didn’t extend as far as the payment kiosk, rendering it absolutely useless.

Just like on Shikotan, over the last few years they’ve drastically reduced the number of servicemen stationed here.

Rusty building endwalls are still the symbol of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky. This is what your typical Petropavlovsk- Kamchatsky building looks like:

They cover the walls with sheet metal because otherwise the rooms on the windward side get buffeted by strong winds. Here’s a fresh one:

Then the sheets go rusty. People who are a bit richer and a bit more resourceful paint their walls:

But far from everyone does this. It’s particularly beautiful when the façade is on the windward side.

I am on the cusp of conceding that summer is well and truly over. Summer is f***ed!

I drove to one seashore.

Then another.

Summer weather was nowhere to be found.

But I did manage to get invited to dinner by a Korean family, and what do you know, they were serving up dog.

This Pedigree Pal seems very fresh...
Spot, where are you?
Woof-woof!

Dog meat tastes like delectable beef. First they served us braised dog, followed by a broth, also made from dog. I didn’t feel any pangs of conscience — if you don’t name your food, if you don’t ask it to fetch you your slippers, then you won’t feel the least bit sorry for it.

Interesting distinguishing trait: women are not invited to sit at the table in traditional Korean families. Young people couldn’t care less about these traditions, but they don’t dare quarrel with their elders.

Midnight in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky! In keeping with tradition, we greeted the new day in the office of Russia’s chief volcanologist, Alexey Ozerov, at his Active volcanology and eruption dynamics laboratory, which is in the Institute of volcanology and seismology of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

On the day we were due to fly out the sky took pity on this tired and weary traveller. The view of the city opened up.

The sun came out and shone on an endwall freshly covered with metallic sheets (the apartment block on the right). It dappled the façade in front of us with a five storey-high sunspot:

Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky is located in one of the most beautiful places in the world (without exaggeration). Coves, the ocean, volcanoes you can see from your balcony, hills, whatever you want, they’ve got it. Nonetheless, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky is one of the most hideous cities in the world. Even worse than Komsomolsk-on-Amur — granted, it’s a total hole, yet it still looks spiffier than this place does. The locals don’t value the surrounding beauty one bit, living in barracks like transients.

They don’t even have any decent hotels in this city. The only hotel that professes to have four stars is 30 minutes drive from the centre in the middle of a dense forest — you’ll waste a lot of time driving back and forth. On the plus side, there’s a submarine base nearby.

The dumb, weak local authorities are incapable of proclaiming Sochi a sorry preventorium-like parody of a resort. This is where the skiing should be happening:

Plenty of space for snowboarders too:

Krasnaya Polyana, the Grand Canyon, Chile, they all pale in comparison.

This isn’t just some swamp in the Easter Island crater. This is the Gorely volcano, with its acid lakes.

If you like you can visit a lava cave (about as high as three humans standing on top of one another).

If you want to see an active volcano you should go to Mutnovsky.

Here you’ve got a glacier and fumarole fields all rolled into one.

* * *

Time to fly back. The helicopter whizzed over the airport where the Moscow- bound plane was already waiting. I managed to make my flight in the nick of time — the crew vowed to fly out on schedule (something that’s never happened before on any regular flight anywhere in the world).

Moscow-bound

An old toy has taken on a new meaning: now my automotive navigation system is equipped with a map of Russia, so you can track where exactly your plane is flying at all times. I broke my pathetic terrestrial speed record on a TU-154 flight (1025 kilometres per hour). Currently our “Boeing” is approaching “Domodedovo” airport at a speed of 757 km/h.

The “Garmin” navigation system is shit, but there isn’t anything better (just like with “Nokia” — it’s an absolute nightmare of a phone, but all the others are even worse). “Navicom”, a Russian company, does “Garmin’s” maps for them. The way the maps work, the licensing policy — it’s like something out of the Dark Ages. The service you get at “Navicom” is on par with what you get at a trolleybus depot cafeteria. The maps are rubbish, but I don’t know of any alternatives.

The most fun you can have with this navigation system is signposting all of the fixed traffic police posts, marked with blue flags and green dollars on the image above (I once drove around this neck of the woods— you can make out the town of Kimry). This very basic information is actually unavailable anywhere else, so I have taken it upon myself to compile a database, which I will publish on this website shortly.