Summer camp '97: Peking - Irkutsk - Sayan - Kitoi - Baikal - Peking
What do you remember when you are to describe your first time 5 years later? For the first time an intercontinental flight, for the first time in the Transsib, for the first time at Lake Baikal...
I remember the many sinuosities of the river Kitoi, on which we canoed in home-made rafts made of tree trunks and car tyres. The water was so clear and cold that we were able to see the pebbles that scampered beneath us. I remember sea buckthorn tea with lots of sugar and burnt rice pudding cooked over the camp fire, the grotto above the river which we climbed, and the view over the endless taiga up to the peak of the Sayan on the horizon. We canoed three days and neither met a soul nor a village. Only the old woman in Rasdolye, who did her laundry in the river, belonged to civilisation again.
And I remember the 3-day trip in the Transsib that I did twice, from Peking to Irkutsk and back. Only that the return trip suddenly lasted four days, because we didn't cross Mongolia but drove around, what we realised during the journey. Can you imagine spending a whole more day in a train in Germany just like that? And who once has tried to send an English telegram to a Chinese tourism organisation at a small Russian train station as a German will never forget the pleasure of three different script systems either.
Lake Baikal is a story itself, it belongs to every journey we made to Irkutsk, each time it presents itself from a different angle, in a different colour. And each time it makes us speechless, awestruck, curious, and sometimes even addicted.
My souvenir collection of this summer? A cassette with Russian disco music, which sounded in every kiosk; a thick, surely hand-forged nail of the Transsib deal board; a recipe for the delicious cabbage pierogi of my host mother, and an almost kitschy, beautiful picture of Lake Baikal, into whose simple wooden frame many Russian dedications are carved.
A text by Christina Franke.
