Day Six

Had a much lazier day yesterday, recovering from our 'extreme' adventure on Wednesday.  Wrote up our impressions so far - at least Heather did.  I mainly just described what we had done with the pages and pages of information, stories we had heard, details I had failed to hear, understand and/or remember still unwritten but totally clogging my brain.

It was basically a physical recovery day, laying around, catching up on a few bits and pieces and building a little energy reserve for the days immediately ahead of us.

I went for a walk in the afternoon, hoping to get down to the seashore but it really wasn't possible from where I was going.  It looked to be a kilometre or so from the hotel, but when I got down there a couple of kilometres later, I was still  on an escarpment with no way down and the shore at least another kilometre away.  My walk consolidated my view about PK being a frontier town, but perhaps not as nice a one as I had thought.

It was like you see in movies as the worst of the Soviet era with derelict half-built structures next to others just being constructed.  Everything seems jammed together higgledy piggle with a shopping centre going up next to several sad looking blocks of flats and a defunct nightclub, all surrounded by acres and acres of raw land dotted with patches of trees, some knocked down, possibly for firewood, and piles of rubbish of every description scattered across the landscape.

Rubbish was everywhere.  Roads and footpaths, to the extent they existed, were broken and uneven to the point where it became difficult to walk in some places.  I took a couple of photos from the escarpment, down some broken steps, behind a crumbling building that a few guys were trying to repair.  Looking down into a jungle of trees, hoping to see some exotic birds, I saw mainly rubbish.  Old machinery, cars, tractors, even an old bus, heaps of broken trees, tyres, bags of rubbish, everything imaginable had just been pushed over the edge and left to rust and rot 50 metres away down the slope.  There was a strong smell of sewage and water runoff had scoured erosion channels down the hill - so even if I could have found a path down to the water's edge, it would have been too uninviting for me to tackle it.  Sad that the locals living along the edge of the area don't care enough to try to keep their backyard a little less unpleasant.

At night the restaurant was full of the people joining the cruise and it was a little uncomfortable being a Westerner among all the other Westerners, some of whom were becoming rather rude that the Russian staff didn't speak proper English.  We think the staff have been truly fantastic and have joined our pointing and gesticulating to explain what we wanted and to see them embarrassed by people who should have known better was a bit beyond the pale.

We are now packed and ready for our Ring of Fire cruise so no more blogging for a week or two.