September 20th, 2008 ~ Homestay in Ust'Barguzin

Maria Bymetova

We are in the home of Maria Bymetova who is as sunny as the bright yellow, sunlit floors of her little house. She is a lovely, tiny woman, 67, a retired veterinarian who has never hosted tourists before and is nervous, but then we're pretty new at this as well, so we can help one another through what is already a highlight of our time in Siberia.

The last couple of days have been full-on travel efforts to move from Irkutsk (at the southwestern end of Lake Baikal) to Zabaikal'skii National Park, midway up the lake's eastern shore. Late Friday night we climbed aboard the Siberian train that would take us from Irkursk overnight to the city of Ulan-Ude. We lined up in the darkness with our packs on our backs and our hands full of tents, cook pots, and plastic shopping bags with food for camping. Before entering our train car we had to produce our passports and tickets, then get our assignments for bunks in the four-bed cubicles.

We are accompanied now by Olga and Elena, both fluent in Russian and English, both great travel companions. Olga was in Seattle last summer as a volunteer with EarthCorps, and we have shared many stories of the Northwest. "When I first went there, I could not find black tea," she told me. "All tea was flavored or herbs and I did not like it. Then I learned that in America black tea is called English Breakfast and I was happy again."

Elena was born in Moscow and was preparing to enter a music conservatory to study piano when her father became a translator at the United Nations in New York City and Elena's career path led to her away from the keyboard to law school and a job on Wall Street. She told me that she had become disillusioned with the corporate culture, so applied for grants to return to Russia. She will be in Siberia for the next two years, writing about this region and its people. She is still interested in classical piano music, and we talked about Russian pianists current and past, and about the music of the great Russian composer Rachmaninov. We said nothing about Wall Street.

Soon after the train pulled out of the Irkutsk station the car matron in her starched uniform delivered sheets for us to make up our beds, delivered hot tea in glasses fitted into metal holders. Very civilized in an English Breakfast sort of way, and while I don't usually drink strong tea just before bed, I'll make an exception whenever I'm on the Siberian Express.

We arrived in the dark in Ulan-Ude and hiked through a square with what Olga told us was one of the two largest busts of Lenin still standing. And there he was, his huge head on a marble pedestal, a relic of a former time silhouetted against the first light of the morning.

Our destination was a parking lot full of mini-vans--the marshrouteka fleet. Elena found our driver and we heaved the packs onto the roof where he covered them with a tarp and lashed them down. Then we piled into the seats--John Schubert, John Griffith, Elena, Olga, and me. Plus enough Russians to pack thirteen of us together in seats facing forward and, in some cases, sideways and backwards.

The drive north took another five hours over increasingly rutted roads, the potholes sometimes seemingly big enough to engulf all of Mr. Lenin's giant head (and perhaps a good use for it). The landscape was rolling hills with snowy mountains in the distance, the trees closer in alive with autumn colors. I was sitting facing backwards, and while most people rode impassively, I would occasionally see their eyes grow large as a log truck up ahead or a speeding motorist with no lateral options or a herd of cows or some impending traffic doom would appear in their fields of vision, and then suddenly they would relax when the danger had passed.

We stopped midway along the drive to let the fillings in our teeth settle back into place and to eat bowls of meat dumplings in a little cafe, then we were rattling off again, sometimes holding our hands against the ceiling to keep being bounced clear out of our seats.

Ust'Barguzin is a spacious village with wider streets than we had seen elsewhere. "I like this place," Olga told me. "It is very clean and nice." Many of the homes were the small wooden structures we've seen all over Siberia with blue or green window shutters, the circle decorations symbolizing the sun and the hope that it will shine often during hard winters. Just in case that doesn't happen, the residents had big piles of firewood stacked in front or alongside the houses.

Firewood for a Siberian Winter

The mini-van let us off in front of Maria Bymetova's home and she meet us at the gate of the high wooden fence. She speaks no English, but is very eager to make us feel at home. Her house is simple--a kitchen to which she hauls water, a living room, a bedroom. We have pulled out couches and unfolded chairs to make sleeping places for everyone, and Maria helped us with the sheets and blankets. Then she insisted we sit for black tea, bread, cucumbers, sour cream, and a jam she told us she had made from sea buckhorn berries.

As we ate, she told us of her life. Her grandparents had struggled during the days of the Czar. Then her parents had lost everything during the Russian Revolution. Her husband had died young from cancer that he may have contracted as a child growing up in one of the Soviet "secret cities" where nuclear materials were produced. Her current life was more settled and she has her house and garden, but there was a time even a couple of years ago when all she owned was the old bicycle, painted gold, that stood along one wall of the kitchen.

"There are many stories like hers," Elena told us. "Life here can be very hard."

Yet we are struck by her cheerfulness and her delight in having us move in with our big backpacks and big American bodies and fill up her house. She promises borscht for supper, and is busy in the kitchen getting it ready.

Tomorrow we're off to the nearby national park to climb a trail up mountain called the Holy Nose. It's probably for the best that we don't yet know much more than that.

BB

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