Siberia - Part Two
After the project we had a two day acclimatisation trek on horses. This was so we could get used to the altitude, as well as camping and cooking on the side of a mountain and peeing in the woods. My horse, named Tirpan, had to be tied to the horseman’s horse because he was quite a nervous horse, and was scared of thunder, and rain, and other horses, and cows, pigs, dogs, cats, chickens, tree roots, tree branches and the farting of the horse in front. The horses were extremely gassy.
People on horses. You can just see me waving at the back.
We trekked for six hours up to Mt Bayda, a mountain just above the village. There was a scary moment when one girl, who we shall call Tiny Jasmine, was thrown from her huge black stallion when it bolted after it started thundering. Tiny Jasmine was actually fine and got right back on, but it
was terrifying.
Mt Bayda campsite - up and downhill
We stayed at a gorgeous campsite, right up on the mountain. One thing that I thought was really cool - which the other group from my school missed out on - was that our horses and our horsemen were proper Mongolian horsepeople! The area of Siberia we were in is pretty close to Mongolia and apparently our horsemen’s families had been horsepeople for generations upon generations. Pretty cool, no?
The day after the two day horse trek we started our real trek - with white water rafting! We rafted down a river for about two hours - getting very sunburnt - then had the Bestest Lunch Evar. See, before this, we’d been in charge of cooking the food. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried putting group of 17 and 18 year old girls with not much experience in the field in charge of cooking for fifteen people in three billy cans over a campfire. Often in the rain. With food packets in Russian. Well, it didn’t work so well. By this stage of the trip, food was usually undercooked or overcooked or there was too much or too little and it was almost always late. But on the first day of the trek we were given food by our Russian translator and guide, Vasya (short for Vasili, the Russian form of Basil), and it was awesome! We were full!
The Akkem river, which we rafted up
We were now out into the proper wilds of Siberia by this point. The area we were in is actually a popular trekking area, as it takes you to the foot of Mount Belukha, so in Siberian terms it was pretty crowded. Relatively. As in, there were paths and some of the campsites had ready-dug toilets, sometimes with curtains to hide you! One toilet had the front curtain missing, so you had the whole mountainside to look at while you went. Awesome.
We were trapped at one campsite for an extra day because there was sideways hail (I realise this is not helping my case of Siberia being warm, but we were camping at 2000+ metres) It was decided by the cooks (who had to get up half an hour early) that walking in this might not be a good idea, so they didn’t wake us up and carried on cooking their, um, inventive breakfast of spaghetti, condensed milk and tinned apricots.
