Ples

October 13–14, 2007

The small oligarch resort town of Ples sits on the banks of the Volga, a four-hour drive from Moscow.

This used to be just one of the many towns on the Volga, that is until enterprising people turned it into a hotel town.

Here every other house is a hotel room.

If it weren’t for the river nearby, they wouldn’t have put in restaurants, nor built jetties here.

They wouldn’t have opened up a wine supermarket, nor started trading in rough diamonds.

It would’ve just been your regular arse end of nowhere on the Volga.

No one would moor their yachts here.

No one would bother paving the roads.

There wouldn’t be any streetlights on the birch trees.

Autumn would come as per usual.

Plants would hide between windowpanes in an attempt to make the summer last.

The leaves would fall.

No one would stroll through the streets.

But someone decided that it would be a shame to keep all this beauty squirreled away.

Someone installed benches and furnished them with stereo rubbish bins.

The city authorities also rose to the occasion and installed concrete green fences around all dumpster areas.

They’re now the most eye-catching sight in town — if you want to marvel at the church, you must admire the rubbish dump first.

Greeting autumn here is pure pleasure. The first snowflakes, sporadic, fall onto the trees; meanwhile, apples fall into the gutters.

It must be said that Ples is light years behind Île de Ré. They’re similar in terms of size and level of infrastructure development. However, for the time being hotels in Russia, regardless of how pricey they are, remain stuck in the Soviet era. The food is absolutely dreadful. All of the food joints in Ples reek of weary catering. In the coffeehouse on the embankment they serve “Ferrero Rocher” chocolates that are past their best-before date, no one has ever heard of “lattes”, and the coffee grinder has never been cleaned. People come here with gaggles of lookalike models of identical build in tow and with two goals in mind: to get wasted and to gaze at Russia’s natural wonders. Russians are generally undiscerning — be it in Turkey or in their own back yard.

The Russian landscape painter Isaac Levitan spent a few years here way back when — he liked the lopsided wooden church and the landscape, typical of this part of central Russia. Now people come here with their very own traffic police escort in order to pray.

Privolzhsk

It’s a town on the way to Ples.

Here there aren’t any hotels nor rowdy crowds biding their time until the season kicks off in Courchevel. Here it’s the locals who drink and then lean against walls in hope of keeing their balance.

On the bright side, they do have a Lenin statue here, a carbon copy of the one in Rostov-on-Don. The difference being that this one is silver, the other is black.

Volgorechensk

The solar eclipse mosaic should’ve been a dead giveaway that there’s nothing to see here.

The rest of the road to Kostroma only served to confirm this hypothesis.