Sunday, September 12, 2010

Stolby Nature Reserve

7 September

We caught a bus out to where we thought we could get a chair-lift to have good views of the rock pillars but once we got off the bus couldn’t find where to go next. But two men spoke to us and through our tiny bits of Russian and their tiny bits of English, we got the idea that they were willing to guide us to the right place in exchange for 500 rubles. So we set off on a walk uphill through a birch forest. This was a steep walk and hard-going considering that we hadn’t prepared for any kind of trek. There were also annoying insects biting us which we later realised were ticks, and possibly encephalitis-bearing ones. Just as we were getting tired and about to turn back we spotted a large stolby through the trees and climbed it for good views of other stolbies and Krasnoyask and the surrounding area. It was a bit of a risky venture, being led into a forest by two stangers but I stayed at the back and had my pocketknife handy in case there was any trouble. Once we got back to town we were still finding ticks on us, and so took showers at the railway station before boarding our train to Novosibirsk.





3 comments:

  1. "It was a bit of a risky venture, being led into a forest by two stangers"

    Cripes, have you never seen Deliverance? I would have thought it a universal rule that grizzled mountain folk have a certain predilection for, and expertise in, making city folk disappear. Having lived most of my life through the reliable medium of B movies (or A movies in the case of Deliverance) I am usually alert for this sort of thing. Thus if I was in Christchurch I'd be on full alert for the inevitable Zombie plague ...

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  2. It was a calculated risk. We wanted to see the damn rocks, had got the bus out there, and going with them seemed the only option.
    And there was only two of them and two of us.

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  3. So too it was in Deliverance, though they at least had two friends including Burt Reynolds, armed with a recurve bow, to rescue them from the creepy rednecks. Remember from B movies always to keep some warm bodies between you and the camera.

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