Helter-Skelter

How I spent the summer. 

This is a typical question for the September essays at school. Although, I finished school years ago, this topic is still immediate in the end of every summer. 

This summer was probably a bit unusual for not only me, but also for a huge amount of people too, because the global disease has had influence on all parts of our lives since the spring with this self-isolation mode, patrols, official passes and etc. However, I can’t say that this totally upset me, because this time in confined space was significant for me and my inner world. Undoubtedly, it didn’t destroy my travelling desire, but it helped me to understand that I can enjoy the local park the same way as a forest in the mountains. 

So, how did I spend the summer? Mostly in the flat in the city. Why? Because I had a lot of work and study, my partner had a huge amount of work, we didn’t want to create unnecessary risk for our elderly parents. In addition, I planted some flowers on our balcony and I really hoped for my efforts not to go in vain. In the beginning of this year I couldn’t predict, that I would have to spent time such way, but after this summer I have discovered, that such type of pastimes can also take place. However, I prefer not to repeat this experience. 

Definitely, I wouldn’t have been myself if I had’t had a small trip at all. Of course, it wasn’t serious distant hiking trip, but my partner and I spent a lovely week in a mountain resort, that was like a ray of sunshine on a cloudy day. Probably, I’ll write about it later.

Well, perhaps I lost any hope to write a longread about my autumn trip, so I am going to show a couple photos and just make some notes…

I was lucky enough to catch the warm period between some rainy weeks, so this trip was like an extra peace of summer, which wasn’t too hot in our region and I felt some deficiency of warm and bright sun. That way, I extended summer a bit and made a shift to warm up in October Alps. 

During the trip, we made a circle which is usually called Tour du Mont Blanc, walked in 3 countries: France, Italy and Switzerland. This path is one of the most popular trekking routs in Alps, it length is around 170 km, and it could be passed in 7 days. The highest point is around 2600m on the mountain pass, which is called Col des Fours. Also, there are 6 other mountain passes, so the whole ascent/descent of attitude is about to 10 kilometers. 

As usual, I hadn’t read a lot about the track before the trip, so I was unprepared for that each day we started from one valley, walked up on a mounting pass and fell down to camping in another valley. Our guide explained to us that it is forbidden to stay on the mounting ridges just in tents without any official camping, so we had to ascend and descend every day and this was hard for me and my knees, even though I’d never had troubles with descents before.

Also, we had a perfect group. I guess, the time for the trip wasn’t popular enough, so we had only 3 members (my partner, one more person and I) plus a guide, which made the average speed quite high. This fact was also unexpected for me, so I was a bit upset during the first days because I had no chance to keep the speed at the appropriate level and felt like a weak sister. Overall, I put up with my endless lagging and the trip became better. 

However, we didn’t walk fast enough, because we often met people, who moved much faster than our group. Probably, it was because we had full equipment with tents and food, while most people walked in the Alps Mountains just with small backpacks with some clothes inside them and stayed at refuges or private hotels. Some of the passersby were running on mountains, some were older than we were and both of these notices were amazing. I often think about the extension of my active period, but still haven’t any idea or decision, so I just admire such people, who can save their lifestyle for advanced age. 

All in all, we finished our track in 7 days and spent one additional day in village Shamony, which is the birthplace of alpinism, mounting tracking and hiking, so nowadays this place is like a small capital for the producers equipment for such activities. The whole streets with special shops and brands, where you can buy any you need and want for outdoor activities. To my partner’s happiness, we were strictly limited in the total amount of our staff, so I just kept window-shopping. 

Also, there are 2 other much more than shopping interesting sights – the peak Aiguille du Midi and the glacier Mer de Glace. The peak is 3842 m height and you can get to the peak by two cable lifters in two steps. You need to make a change on 2317 m above the sea level and the end is on 3777m height. We spent more than 3 hours in the observation deck, visited several museums, watched a documentary and enjoyed the perfect views on the valley under the peak. 

We got to another famous attraction the glacier Mer de Glace by the Montenvers Railway, which was built in 1909 year when tiny trains delivered respectable gentlemen in hats and madams in long skirts and with umbrellas to the glacier. The trains still work, but the landscape has changed greatly, because of global warming. Although the length of the glacier is 12 km, the area is 33.1 km2, and the ice thickness reaches 400 m, the glacier is melting so fast, that this looks scary, when you observe the lifeless channel of the thawing off glacier and when you went down to upstairs inside the glacier and see the point tablets with the previous levels and dates. It goes away more than 30 cm per year from 1939 and the glacier lost nearly a quarter of their volume in the last 100. Here you can see obviously how global warming influences the landscape and understand the real consequences like the lack of clear water for such regions. Of course, during our track, we observe glaciers, which also melted and went away from their start positions, but here we got the full impression of this part of global warming trouble. 

New Year’s holidays came and finished, while I still couldn’t find any inspiration for writing a post about our first trekking in Europe in Autumn. I didn’t notice how we lost a moment and didn’t have any real plans for the holiday season, because time was running too fast. Therefore, we decided to choose the simplest way and took a car trip to the nearest sea – Baltic Sea.

This trip can be described like this: if you can’t go mountain trekking in winter, just drive to 1000 km from your home in a small car, be the only driver and do it in winter, when the days are short, but the nights are dark, and only Gods know what can happen with the weather and the highway. After the trip I can say the highway was mostly perfect, so I didn’t have any complaints about it. That’s about it. 

We left Moscow early in the morning of January, the 1st and got closer to the border to spending the night at a small village house, which I booked beforehand. The house was fully furnished including a polite mouse, which was kind and tried to be quiet until we had enough rest and started to rustle only early in the morning.

We met sunrise at the border checkpoint. All the procedures took 2 hours, which was inexplicably quickly for the holiday season. The customs officer paid attention to the sticker sign of a kettle on my back windshield (that means a “beginner driver” and I couldn’t get it off for several years) and wished to be careful. Probably, her wish saved us from greater troubles, so the whole 2500 km trip was mostly peaceful and rather easy, including the 16 hour way back to home. It’s funny, but after the trip the sticker sign nearly come off…

I’d been to Latvia before, but I’d never used a car there, so I wanted to see more in of the regions closer to Riga. However, I didn’t finalize our excursion program till the last days. I just wanted to visit The Great Ķemeri Bog and to see a couple of castles. Of course, I hoped to get a trip as eventful as we could, but the short winter light days destroyed all my illusions because almost after 16:00 it was too dark for walk especially in the countryside. 

In my opinion, the most impressive sight in our trip was The Big Kemery Bog, which is located at the national park and we had a walk on the bog using Boardwalks, which were placed around. There were 2 variants of paths – the short (1.5 km) one and the long (3.4 km) one and our choice was obvious. During the stroll the weather tried to show us as much as it could, so it was sunny, windy, rainy, snowy and sunny again, and we were close to total misunderstanding about the season. Was it Spring, Autumn or Summer? We didn’t know, but it should be noticed, that this winter has been a bit abnormal in Latvia, too.

Besides the wonderful walk around the Bog, The Alternative Riga Free Tour (with yellow suitcase https://www.rigafreetours.com/riga-alternative-free-tour) was amazing, too. For me, who had spent hours walking around Riga, the tour was full of new information nonetheless. The guide paid a lot of attention to the special historical and cultural aspects of the development of the Latvian Nation, their communication with the nearest countries, their attitude to the language and the national identification.

The castles and the historical manors were not so interesting, but they also were worth noticing. My favorites were Turaidas pils and Jaunmokas Manor. The first was established the 1214, destroyed the 1774 and mostly reconstructed in the middle of the 20th century. The second (Jaunmokas Manor) was built in 1901 as a hunting lodge for the Mayor of Riga George Armitstead and later turned to a children’s sanatorium in 1926. Now it is a museum.

It looks like I decided to extend and mix seasons in this year just a bit, because in the spring I met the winter, in the summer I was in the spring. It’s curious what will wait for me in the autumn. I hope, that it’ll be summer because our local one got lost somewhere and doesn’t want to return, despite the fact that the whole region has been trying to find it for 2 months. However, while I was in Mongolia, I didn’t know about our perfect summer perspectives, so I was full of hope that the cold nights and the windy days would be left in Mongolia. Maybe, the Mongolian weather came with me to the region, like a humble reminder about the cold lonely nights in my tent. We spent mostly in the spring mountains the next 3 days in Mongolia. The higher we were the warmer it became, so we could see how the forest woke up after the winter. There was a huge amount of primroses, whose names I didn’t know, the bushes were all in a greenish haze of fresh leaves and the larches just were beginning to turn green. The cold air from the icy lake didn’t rise so high, as we did and I felt as if the nights were a bit warmer, despite the necessity of breaking the ice in the small streams to wash up your face in the mornings. To be honest, I don’t know the exact name of the ridges where we spent our time, but I suppose that those were the Khoridol Saridag mountains with the highest point on Delgerkhaan Uul (3093m) and the two other peaks were Ikh Uul (2961m) and Uran Dösh Uul (2702m). I think, that we saw them, but I can’t point it on the photos and this is pretty sad. We, sorry, our horses with us on their backs climbed up 3 small mountain passes (max 2200m) during the 4th day and again I couldn’t help admiring their stamina and survivability on such scarce pastures with such heavy load. Iron animals. Of course, at one perfect moment, we lost our way, which is common for my trips, so I didn’t ask any questions. However, our guides decided to separate to find the right path but that was a bit strange idea, so we lost the main guide and spent some time shouting and wandering in the forest, among cedar pines and thickets of red rhododendron, which is called ledum (bagulnik) in our country. That part of the trip would have been breathtaking if we hadn’t found our main guide, because the packhorse with all our equipment was with him, while we only had the horse with the food and the perspect of the night in the mountains without warm clothes and tents wasn’t bright. However, after half an hour we found grinning Grandfather sitting on the log with the hand-rolled cigarette in his hand. I think it was too easy. Probably, the mountains decided to be benign for us. It should be noticed, that our itinerary was like the first in its type, because our guides hadn’t ever ridden along that whole way, so that was the reason of our long second day march and the slight loss of path in the mountains. We were supposed to spend 8 days in the active part of the trip with horses and nights in the tents, but in total it was only 7 days. All in all, it leaded to the fact, that we could finish our trip a day earlier. We were returning to the lake bank from the mountains on the 5th day along a deep valley, already full of fresh grass. That meant that the weather became warmer and the pastures – richer, so our horses rushed to the green grass and couldn’t stop grazing. We knew, that the animals were able to graze for the whole evenings and nights, so we could sometimes afford to gallop along the road in the valley and the lakeside during the last 3 days of our trip. 

My first thought, when I saw our horses, was “how they are so … small-scale”. I’ve seen various horses in my life, but these were really slender for the first impression. Also, our guides told us that the winter had been hard and the horses hadn’t got enough forage. “Well, it’s one more important notice that the guides had to say before our coming…” So, looking at the horses’ condition, I couldn’t stop thinking about the prospect of spending a 7-day trip with them.

However, I got it so wrong, because a real Mongolian horse is made from iron or titanium. This breed has been saved from Genghis Khan’s epoch without any significant changes. Our indirect but respective offspring of the ancient horses could gallop more than 10 km without any stops, drink only once a day, spending the whole year outside without any supplementary feed, other than it finds itself, could and transport cargo closer to its own weight. We didn’t test all the horses abilities that time, but what we saw made a significant impression on us. Our horses, without any rejections, transported us and our equipment along the lake bank, in the mountains, through the mountain passes and, at the end of our trip still didn’t look haggard. It was amazing and commanded respect.

The first day’s march wasn’t long by distance, but we spent enough time repacking our stuff. Denis explained that this was a common practice, because we had a lot of equipment and it was the first trip in the season for our guides, so they had to remember how they could load up the horse so that nothing dropped down.

Also I had a funny moment with the saddle. Well, I’m pampered princess when it comes to long horseback travels and there wasn’t any tradition of “comfortable” saddles from a European’s point of view in Mongolia. The traditional Mongolian saddle is made of wood, has 2 high saddlebows and it doesn’t have any skin lining with soft filler. Fortunately, we didn’t have such saddles, but our variants weren’t reasonably comfortable for my delicate nature. So, when at one moment, the guide understood that the saddle pad of my horse was too long and cut it, I immediately asked him to give me this piece of thick felt despite the fact I also had a sheepskin covering my saddle. Later, the thick felt warmed me during cold nights until Den lost it to my regret.

I should notice that a woman riding a horse looks strange for locals, so they tried to help me in any questions and forgive all the mistakes and vagaries and my strange request for the piece fitted into their image about strange European girls.

By the by, the first camp night was warm despite the night shower, which turned out to be snow in the nearest mountains – in the morning we could see the bright line between the snow and the rain in the opposite mountains.

The second day wasn’t so light for me as the first one. It was the hardest day of the whole trip because we spent nearly 9 hours (~45km distance) only in saddles. The day was so long because for a long time we couldn’t find the combination of water-pasture-firewood at one place.

I made a giant mistake – I forgot to take out the wool warm socks (because when we were setting out it was sunny and warm) and I froze to the bones due to the strong north wind, cloudy weather and periodic light snow. I was at disgusting mood for the most part of the day. Ok, I felt ashamed, but I still remember my wet and icy legs, so everybody could excuse me.

When we found the proper place it was late evening, so I immediately tented and got into to my sleeping bag in the pathetic hope to warm myself. I put on all the warm clothes, the down jacket, the raincoat, the sheepskin and, of course, the piece of thick felt, cursing myself for the endless search of adventures.

I think it’s time to return to small stories about previous months and my journeys. 

In the February I asked my partner to go to Saint Petersburg just for 2 days, because we didn’t celebrate New Year’s holidays together. To my surprise, he agreed and choose weekend after Valentine's Day. 

At the beginning of this trip we almost missed our train, because I couldn’t predict the traffic jam in the Center on an early Saturday morning. We got on the train in the last moment before departure, and this was too nervous for me, so in train I couldn’t sleep, read, surf the web, I just looked in the window with the early morning and February landscape. I think this episode influenced our trip and my mood, so, as my partner noticed, I was quiet and irresolute. 

We spent 1.5 days in SP, so I only visited only 2 museums, as planned, and rambled around the city. At the beginning, I wanted to watch the impressionist and modern art collection of the Hermitage, however, I totally forgot that this exhibition is located in the General staff of the Hermitage. But for my mistake, we could have got the full impression from the late European art. Instead of that we refreshed our knowledge about the earlier period (Leonardo, Rembrant) in the main building. 

Despite my rule “never spent more than 2 hours in art museums”, I was full of determination to visit the modern art exposition, because Van Gogh is perfect in any situations even if you are exhausted. Probably, it wasn’t a right decision, but we didn’t have any other time. 

Full of art and impressions, we spend the rest of the day walking around the city, became an unwitting witnesses of the accident in ITMO University, when one part of the building fell down.

All in all, we returned to the hotel. Our room was cozy and too tiny, but the huge window was facing Nevsky Prospect, so we sat on the wide windowsill and enjoyed our evening tea with treats. 

Next day we visited the museum of political history of Russia, it was like a payment to my partner for the previous art day, because he wasn’t interested in art much, so the history museum especially some with political flavor could satisfy him more.

To be honest, I planned to spend no more than 2 hours and go to the nearest café for lunch. If I had known more about this museum before our visit, I could have had a normal breakfast in the morning, because we spent in the museum nearly 4 hours and that wasn’t my limit, but I was too hungry for continue exploring the exposition with great attention.

The collection covers the period from the reign of Catherine II to the end of 1990 and the first president's new year’s speech about his tiredness completes the exposition. The part of the Soviet period is the biggest and museum tried to be impartial in the assessment of events of this period, but as for me, the main colour was closer to dark than bright. This was only my opinion because later, in May, my parents were in this museum and they didn’t notice such misbalance.

We finished our journey be the trip in double-deck train, where dreams about history and it’s place in our lives came to me.

Our first plan was to stop for the next camp at the Charyn canyon at the National Park of the same name, but our late departure from the first camp, the first day in the real road relaxed us, so we listened to the advice of a random saleswoman at the gas station, who told us that there were various types of small hotels not far from the town Chundzha with water pools of hot water from springs and we probably might find something cheap despite the holidays. A forgetful head makes a weary pair of heels, so we decided to spent the night at the rest area “Hot springs” instead of sleeping in the tent.

We got to an appropriate hotel in the darkness, having driven through the thick fog when we were like in a cloud and couldn’t see more than 50 metres forward, anticipating swimming pools with hot water. To our regret, the reality was harder. 

The hotel with free rooms which we could find on the 1st of January had only 2 swimming pools with 35 and 38 C water, which wasn’t hot enought in my opinion. The swimming pools were in open air and it was near -2C. Probably the regrettable temperature of the water caused my further cold or the reasons were deeply and closely connected with my inability to have enough rest during not only holidays, but the fact is the fact: after the night in this hotel I fell ill. 

I lost my voice and couldn't speak to the guys’ delight, so I met the morning with my deep and gloomy hush. Given our plan for having a walk and camping in the Charyn Canyon that day, my perspectives weren't rainbowing.

Charyn Canyon is located in National park following the Charyn River for more than 90 km. The canyon consists of sedimentary rocks 150-300 m and about 12 million years old. I’d heard before that Charyn is called the small copy of the Grand Canyon, but I didn’t believe it until I saw it.

We wanted to spend the night in the bottom part of the canyon and assumed to drive there, but our car wasn’t off-road enough, so we just walked down lightly and up in the most popular part of the canyon, which is the Valley of Castles 2 km long and what took us nearly 2.5 hours, because of 2 reasons: there were 2 photographers in our team and my condition became worse and worse. On our way back, I wanted to die as soon as possible, but the guys didn't allow me to do it. Instead, having thought a lot, they decided to pick up our backpacks from the car and walk down the canyon to the river again because we didn’t have any water. 

Of course, there was total darkness outside the car to the moment of this decision. Of course, I didn’t want to go anywhere. Of course, this was the best night walk in my life. The rocks were highlighted with our lanterns and transformed into curious figures of dinosaurs, animals and people, so this created a totally different scenery instead of daytime.

The guys tactfully denied my suggestion of help, set up the tent, cooked the dinner, put me in the sleeping bag with a cup of hot glintvein and strongly asked to drop out of their sight. To the morning, my illness gave up and went away, but it left me with a deep cough. The guys tried to fix the cough with a licorice infusion, which had been bought by an incredible accident, but I took the awful cough to Moscow with me as a souvenir.

We had breakfast with the perfect view on the Charyn River and walked to another side of the canyon above the Valley of Castles. When we reached the vantage point, I suddenly understood how small we are before the power of nature, which could create this amazing place using only the power of water, wind and sun. I don’t have enough word to describe my feelings, because this is the story about deep and inexplicable perception of the world. If this Canyon is “the small copy of the Grand Canyon”, what impression the real one can give?

By a stroke of luck, shortly before the sun set, we heard our shepherds voices and saw two horses, one of which was with our backpack. As for the other one, I’d never seen a horse so sweaty before, because it looked as if it had been under the shower for a long time. The reason was that the shepherds were so disappointed with their mistake with our stuff, so they had been trying to solve this problem as soon as possible, so one of them almost ride his horse to death, when he searched the lost one. Al in all we got our equipment back so I could lie down in my tent with my sleeping bag and have such a welcome rest. Another awaited us the next day. We needed to climb up the mountain pass Atcunta (3430m), wich is a natural border between two the regions of Tushety and Khevsurety. Technically, this mountain pass wasn’t complex and it didn’t have tasks like Chaukhy pass (loose rock), but the slope was harder and longer than the previous pass, because the slope ascended overall 1000m per 8 km, with highs and lows just before the pass Atcunta. This time the top point of the mountain pass was almost clear for me, and I was a bit proud when I reached the point, but my happiness wasn’t long because that it was so windy and cold on the top and there were not any covers, so I was cold and started to get upset very soon.

Shatili is a small village in Khevsurety. The main sight of the village is a fortress placed on a cliff, above the confluence of rivers Shatilliskally and Argun. The fortress is a fortified complex of residential buildings and defensive towers with a height of 3 to 5 floors. The buildings and the towers intertwine with each other, so you can move inside the fortress without going outwards. Some of the buildings are linked with each other by small bridges at the levels of 2-3 floors. There is a whole system of small streets inside the fortress, which looks like a labyrinth because some of the passes end with dead-ends or merged another one.

The whole fortress is free for visitors so I wanted to spend a couple of hours there, but we needed to hurry up, because the 4th day of our trip uncluded a short relocation to the abandoned village of Mutso, which was founded (as the legend would have it) either in the XII century during the reign of Queen Tamara, or around the XVI-XVII centuries. Most likely this place was abandoned in the middle of XIX century, when plague suffers patients were delivered there for dying from the neighboring village. We managed to see the crypts with human remains on the way to Mutso and at the foot of the fortress. The skulls were quite well preserved…

The fortress complex in Mutso looks like the fortress in Shatili, but it is more grand-scale, which makes it possible to evaluate the real size of the complex from the opposite hill only. We had to climb up the stiff slope and under the scorching sun in order to get to the fortress, so I didn’t have enough stamina to walk inside. I just sat in one of the first buildings looking on the river far under the fortress.

The equipment of the laziest tourists could be moved on horses from Mytso during the next several days. My partner and I decided to pick up one horsebackplace for our heavy and large equipment, like our tent, sleeping bags, warm clothes etc. We left only what we would need during the walking day – my camera for raincoats, fleece jackets, cups, other, small items and etc.

We needed to walk from Mytso to the ridge Khidotani with the slope reaching nearly 1000m of height. 

The horses with their drovers walked separately from our group, so we expected to wait for them, then we got to the ridge. However, my partner, I and even the head of our group didn’t expect the drovers to lose their horse with our backpack. They said, “One of our horses has escaped to the village, so we don’t know when she’ll return, but we’ll probably try to solve this problem”.