Siberia and Beyond - The Valley of Geysers, Kamchatka

There are only four active geysers in the world. In the order of their discovery, Iceland ,U.S, New Zealand and Kamchatka, Russia. A geyser is a hot spring that spurts water out after every few hours. Now imagine 5 -6 of them and boiling water coming out every 30 mins or so. The air has a mild scent of sulphur and as you try to capture the oozing water in you’re picture frame its gone, you try again until you leave the camera in your backpack and enjoy the geo thermal activity with your eyes only.

I asked my guide is that mountain a volcano too. She said, every mountain that you see has been a volcano in some point of time. Well, I saw it later from air on my way to the valley of geysers, when every mountain that passed had a shade of black, the volcanic ash.  The only way to reach the most attractive places in this peninsula is by a helicopter. The price’s are not very pocket friendly and a flight can set you back by around $ 800 to $ 900, however what you see on the other side of the flight will be every cent taken care of. Thanks to high prices, you are mostly on your own, one with nature.

Its easy to write about food and the people I meet, but about nature, words simply don’t make the justice.

Having seen the Volcanoes from the sky, the real assent will start tommorow, when after a 5 hour trip on a roadless terrain we drive in a 6 x 6 truck till we reach the base of the Volcano, where our tents will be set. There we stay for 2 nights and climb 2 volcanoes over a period of 2 days.

The flip side of a business cum leisure trip is that the business always carries more weight and so here I am looking at my co travelers taking the trip ahead to a lake where 40 – 50 bears feed on salmon swimming up stream. Then they get on a river and raft for 3 days, fishing for trout and get another chance to see the bears and at the end they sleep with families from a village which is the oldest in this Peninsula but have their houses heated by the underground heaters through an age old system.  And as they do all this, I will be in Mumbai. The good news however is I will come here again, the next time with my people. 

The volcanoes are so huge that they even make the ocean look small. The Pacific ocean hugs the landscape and lets it dominate. Nature rules supreme here, and the government does every bit to protect it. Tourism is important for the economy, but by the way of things and the Russian mentality, commercialization will be hard to come in the next 20 years atleast.

‘Kamchatka’ the far east of Russia goes far beyond your wildest of imagination.  To be here is just a privilege.