Yakutethnoexp. Part IV

March 3–7, 2011

The polar circle.

Polar

The post on top of which the circle sits is stuffed with gifts from passing drivers.

It has gotten warmer outside.

−45 °С.

The last thing I’d want to do right now is change a tire. Luckily, the need didn’t arise.

Speaking of tires, dump truck tires are repurposed as leveling drags. They’re hitched to the back of a tractor or truck and dragged along the temporary winter roads. This evens out the road surface.

There’s a certain contradiction between the thrill of traveling to faraway places and the availability of cellular service. Even though base stations can have a signal reach of as far as 72 km, the mere existence of a signal attests to the ephemerality of the adventure component.

But not to worry, soon we won’t have any reception for an entire week.

Olenyok

It was −50 °С this morning.

When it gets this deathly cold, a fog forms.

The locals are used to it—they smoke with their mitten off.

A local cop approached me to say hello at the gas station. It had been just two days since they’d been renamed to “police” and he was already being addressed as “Mr. police officer,” he said. We shook hands, after which I struggled to restore my thermal balance for another ten minutes, and my fingers threatened to fall off.

Olenyok had absolutely nothing to do with the war, but the propaganda is a must.

Eternal is the feat of arms of the Soviet people — the victorious people!

A mysterious finding.

Sobriety and healthy lifestyle territory

The ambient temperature doesn’t stop people from drying their laundry outdoors.

Someone added “un-” to the inscription on the frieze of the boarded-up community center. Even though the local residents are more than friendly and hospitable.

Unwelcome!

We travel further down the river. It’s incredibly beautiful, with steep banks on both sides. Sometimes you can picture yourself speeding along on a motorboat. But a river-based ethnographic expedition is only in the planning stages as of now.

Zhilinda

A small Dolgan settlement.

I kept waiting to come across a village populated by the dregs of society, derelicts who had sunk to rock bottom. But I never did. People lead normal lives, and the standard of living is no worse than in remote villages in Alaska. There’s a snowmobile parked in front of every house. Everyone has their share of meat, skins, furs.

You’d think that all the settlements here would be absolutely identical in terms of their household setup. But every single one has something uniquely its own. That’s precisely what makes travel interesting—uncovering such unique details in various places. In Zhilinda, it’s the animal skins or carpets nailed over the lower edges of windows to prevent drafts.

We travel further down the river.

Saskylakh

This is the furthest point in Yakutia reachable by a more or less ordinary SUV.

This is as far as the winter road is cleared.

A local.

Locals.

Happy New Year!

There’s absolutely no Internet here, but everyone keeps pulling out their digital cameras and cell phones to snap photos of the amazing sticker-covered car. Afterwards, they gather around the fireplace and show the photos to one another.

In the summer, a cart takes everyone’s barrels to the river for water. They’re marked to make sure they don’t get mixed up.

Apt. 2, Apt. 5

In the winter, cut-up blocks of ice are sold. People pile them in front of their porch and then take them inside to melt as needed. It seems that melted snow is used for laundry, but tea is made only with melted ice.

Hurrah-victory-day posters hang everywhere here as well. They’re afraid to take them down. What if some spirit gets offended?

Glory to our veterans!

I walk into a grocery store, ask for bread. The saleswoman is genuinely surprised—bread, she says, is at the bakery. I go to the bakery. The place looks like it last opened its doors about a year ago. But suddenly there’s a stir in the streets. It’s 2 p.m., the bakery is open for business, everyone rushes in. What joy—bread isn’t suffocated in plastic here, it’s sold as is. Warm and straight into your hands.

Fish is also handled with bare hands.

Saddle up your reindeer, we’ve got a trail to blaze to the employment center.

Anabar Ulus Employment Center

Many people can’t tell different types of Asians apart. Here’s a brief guide to identifying Yakuts and Dolgans. On the left, we have a Russian for calibration purposes. In the center is a Dolgan. On the right, a Yakut. Yakuts are easy to identify because you can barely see their actual eyeballs, just the crack between the eyelids.

Yuryung-Haya

This is a fairly remote settlement, there’s no longer any cell reception out here. Perfect time to unfold the Coucousique-mounted satellite dish. Our first space transmission. The Wi-Fi turns on automatically, the other crews get online via their laptops and cell phones.

Yuryung-Haya is the northernmost point of our expedition. From here, we go west through the tundra.

This is where the tundra begins.

This is where the count of days ends.

There’s a halo demonstration in the sky almost every day (see Greenland or Bhutan).

We encounter reindeer.

We encounter reindeer herders.

The reindeer herders are already plastered in the wee hours of morning.

We stop for the night. I once read that you can’t take a photo of the northern lights. That they aren’t visible on film or something. Turns out, you can take photos of them to your heart’s content. The view outside Coucousique’s window:

During the day, there’s snow. Lots of snow. Without sunglasses, it’s almost unbearably bright. For the first time in my life, I found myself photographing snow.

The border between the Yakutsk and Krasnoyarsk administrative regions.

All sense of time has vanished.