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Planets Align!
- Older in Siberia 2004: Stuck in Petropavlovsk - Newer in Siberia 2004: Now on skis
latitude 600 11' longitude 1650 28' Finally the planets that determine the quirky Siberian airplane schedule lined up and we escaped our prison in Petropavlosk. Misha and I had been stuck, waiting for our flight for over a week and I was antsy verging on homocidal. We landed in Tilichiki, a small town on the east coast of Kamchatka, but the real point of take off for this crazy wander is the tiny Koryak village of Vvenka. The only way to get there is a two-hour snowmobile ride south of the airport. Near the runway I spotted Sergei and Oleg dressed in sealskin mukluks, deerskin pants, boxy canvas anoraks, and hats with top corners that stand up like dog's ears. Their faces were grim, they had just barely made it. After a winter of record-breaking cold and snow, it had suddenly turned way warm. Sergei's honking, Russian-made Boran snowmachine had just about sunk through the ice into the Vvenka River. The frozen river is our highway to the village. We hung in Tilichiki until midnight and snowmobiled into Vvenka the next morning. Oleg's wife Lydia met us at the front door. She picked off a bit of lint from each of our coats, and burned them in the shovel full of burning coals. Got to get rid of the evil spirits you know. Maybe it worked, it's down to -6 C so we will head north for Nikolai's reindeer camp in the morning.
Dated: 03/25/2004
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