Day Four

The adventure really begins today - and what a day it was!!!!!!!!!!

 We arrived in PK early afternoon yesterday and were met at the airport and driven the 20-odd Km to our hotel where we checked in and got a bit settled - including a well-overdue shower and a bit of washing after 3 days in the same clothes.  It was 1 degree C and we loved being a little less overheated.  I was just in shirtsleeves and even before we even got off the plane, one of the locals reminded me that we were now in Kamchatka and that we should be rugged up with four layers of heavy clothing like everyone else.  Even our 'guide' was rugged up like a polar bear and complaining about the bitter cold when we were standing around outside in the wind, loving it with less than a quarter of their clothes on.

It was lovely when we landed, but very foggy and a bit rainy later in the day and I rugged up a bit with the intention of going for a walk before dinner, but decided against it at the last minute rather than getting wet and not being able to dry off easily.  We had eaten in the hotel restaurant at lunchtime and both had borsch (pronounced boscht for any plebs, like us, who didn't know the difference) - absolutely WONderful.  For dinner, I had a Kamchatka beer and Kamchatka fish pie and that was even better.  I just wanted to try the local food and it was simply delicious.

We slept pretty well again and were up reasonably early for breakfast.  We needed to find a bank where we could get some local currency and we needed to replace the power adapter that we left in the socket in HK so we went exploring not far from the hotel and found a bank with a sports store above it that happened to have the adapter we needed.  We felt very proud of ourselves having negotiated our little bit of business without a word of Russian.

PK looks like a frontier town and probably is.  Function is obviously much more important than elegance.  Most things look almost finished - but not quite.  Just missing a coat of paint or some architraves or a new item to replace the temporary work-around.  Nothing looks 'undone' but it seems that the next project might be more important than finishing off the current one.  It is all pretty functional but lacks the final touches.  The best way to describe it is probably that it really is a frontier town!

There was a fair bit of confusion about whether our trip to the Valley of he Geysers was going to happen or not.  It was an absolutely beautiful day where we were - around ten degrees - but 180 Km away, things were apparently very foggy so the helicopter could not go in.  Numerous phone calls back and forth and eventually it was ON!

Our guide collected us from the hotel and took us on a tour of the town - something that was not on the itinerary we saw.  Quite interesting with some of the local history, and a lot of interesting stories about Kamchatka.  Elina, our guide, was a mine of information and absolutely devoted to her part of the world.  She spoke non-stop and answered all our questions in excellent English before she arranged a cab to take us all to the helicopter near the Airport.  I was a bit apprehensive about flying about in this tiny glass bubble with my fear of heights - but somehow, I must have left my fear back at home.  They warned us that the flight would be rather windy and we were carrying sick-bags in case we got too shaken around.  That obviously heightened my trepidation, but as it turned out our young pilot was brilliant and we had an exhilarating ride with no hint of fear at any stage.  It was fabulous!  About 90 minutes to do the 200 km to the Valley and it was the experience of a lifetime.

We flew at around 2500 feet most of the time, but it was simply wonderful to fly along snow-covered valleys, across literally hundreds of rivers and streams, over tundra and low scrub, millions of bare birch and aspen (I think) - and we even saw a bear who stood up to look at this strange bird in its territory.  There are about 20000 brown bears in Kamchatka but they rarely eat people.  We needed to be a little careful, but they have plenty of other food that they apparently/fortunately like better than humans.  When we were walking around in the Valley a bit later, we watched and photographed a bear eating plants (and keeping an eye on us) for quite a while - and we reckon it was a maximum of 30 metres away.  We saw another five bears from further away on our way back to the ranger station and when eating our lunch there at about 6pm.  Glad we had an early snack before setting out on our expedition.

The flight was simply fantastic, but the Valley was something else again.  30 degrees although it felt cooler and more pleasant, and simply a perfect day.  We were accompanied by our guide and an armed ranger - just in case of overly-inquisitive bears, even though they are not regarded as a problem.  The problem is usually the humans who don't obey the rules.  There is a series of boardwalks, including about a million and ten steps that have to be traversed in BOTH directions, passing close to a range of different fascinating features.  One of the geysers was due to erupt just after we got there so we hurried down and saw it in all its glory, jetting out huge sprays of boiling water and super-heated steam.  There are four phases in each eruption and that geyser erupts once every hour.  It was boiling furiously and exploding almost continuously when we arrived and suddenly there was the violent eruption that shot huge jets of boiling water ten or fifteen metres into the air right next to where we were standing.  It was so violent and dramatic, but was just one of so many different features we saw within a few square Kms.  There was a boiling mud pool 15 metres from this geyser and dozens of smaller steam vents and geysers all up the mountain from our platform.  Our guide was very knowledgable and told us a lot about the area, the natural environment in the region, geyser physics and so on and was able to answer all our questions.

We were the ONLY tourists there that whole day so had the ranger and the entire valley to ourselves too.  We walked to another vantage point where we were immediately adjacent to numerous lesser features, but perhaps 50 to 100 metres from another 20 or so dramatic seething geysers, vents, boiling pools, steaming waterfalls and so on.  Of course, the whole area was surrounded by snow so on one side of the river, we had steaming cataracts gushing downwards and 50 metres away, waterfalls of snow-melt were cascading into the same river.

Words are quite inadequate to describe either the scene or the emotions it evoked.  We were bombarded with a rich flow of fascinating information, standing in a natural cauldron of steam and snow, grandeur of the mountains contrasting with the excitement of watching a wild brown bear not much more than arm's reach away, completely new birds to be identified, along with dozens of hitherto unseen types of vegetation in a volcanic area more diverse and intriguing than even I had ever imagined.  Not quite Neolithic, but alien in the extreme, yet in no way frightening.  I wish I could capture some of the scene and some of my thoughts at the time, but that is quite impossible.

We walked on past more cauldrons of seething water and boiling mud, throbbing, booming and hissing steam blow-holes, from saucepan-sized to swimming pool size - but promising a quick but agonising death for anyone thinking of going swimming.

I had been a little nervous about becoming asthmatic from the sulphur fumes, but there was no problem at all.  Relatively faint smell around our first dramatic geyser, but we either got used to it very quickly or it was confined to that very small area.

I could write a few more pages about the Valley, but if anyone actually reads this, they would get bored and stop so I will hasten back to our very late boxed lunch and the helicopter trip back.

We returned via a completely different and even more dramatically beautiful and awe-inspiring route.  We climbed to 3700 feet almost straight away and flew down a valley where the snow seemed only metres way from our tiny transparent egg - although in reality, I doubt if we ever got closer than 10 or 15 metres away.

We were flown over mountain escarpments and down snowy valleys crisscrossed with bear tracks.  Many of the mountains are dormant volcanoes, some of which have erupted within the past couple of years, but looking quite innocent and benign under their mantle of soft white snow.  One large valley area had grey snow, from the ash from the most recent eruption and that mountain appeared to have no snow at all.

We landed near some hot springs and Heather and I had a laze around in the steamy warm water while the pilot and guide chatted with the local ranger - until the mozzies found us.  We set off again from yet another idyllic valley and made our way back through the snowscape to the tundra and finally back to the helicopter pad.  All in all, it was a truly remarkable day and definitely worth the three year wait to get my 70th birthday present.  It was the sort of day everyone should experience once in a lifetime  if they are lucky enough!!!!!

Words fail me completely, but suffice to say, it would be hard to forget a single minute of it - and this was only the beginning of our odyssey.