Dacha Part 1

I’m on a distinctly Soviet-feeling train, steadily clanking along a beautiful valley filled with autumnal red and yellow trees. The River Yenisei is on my left, sparkling in the setting sun. The train is taking me back to Krasnoyarsk after my first excursion into the Siberian wilderness.

I didn’t write a blog yesterday. That’s because Danil (a friend from INTERRA) invited me to his parents’ dacha for the weekend. Dachas are small cottages in the countryside where Russians go to relax. Visiting people is quite a big deal in Russia, you’re really meant to bring your hosts a present, but I didn’t have time to go and get one. I still feel bad about that, looking back on how unbelievably generous their hospitality was. Hey ho, next time.

Saturday started with the much-anticipated recycling festival. This had been hanging over my week like a huge storm cloud, so, naturally, I’d done nothing at all to prepare for it. I pulled myself out of bed at an unholy hour in the morning and stared in horror at the pathetic little pile of recyclable things that I’d amassed on my desk. In the next three hours, I had to turn all of this into an elaborate open-air display which would educate the general public about recyclable materials, and then I had to find the park where my ‘interactive square’ needed to be set up. For some reason which I still don’t understand, I told the organiser of the festival that my ‘interactive square’ would take the form of a ‘kvest’ (quest). I think it’s because she was pressing me for a name down the phone on Monday, and ‘kvest’ was the only thing I could think of on the spot. Now I had to deliver on that promise, and I found myself wondering what exactly a ‘kvest’ entailed. I had a treasure hunt in mind, but I couldn’t really see that appealing to adults, even if the treasure was treasure. Here, the treasure wouldn’t be treasure. Here, it would be empty milk cartons and bits of cardboard. I decided to start by making a quiz. First, I found a bunch of facts about recycling and wrote them down on a piece of A4 paper. Then I stuck some post-it notes over the answers, so that people could guess them and then check whether they were right. Then I stumbled across some crayons, and everything kind of unravelled from there. Two and a half hours later, I added the finishing touches to a giant doodle of a vine climbing up the side of my quiz, and realised that it was time to go. My doodles were good, my facts were mediocre, and my pile of recyclable materials was still sitting on my desk, forlorn and unused. I stuffed some biscuits into my bag and headed for the festival.

To my immense relief, I was the first one there. This meant that I didn’t have to use my ‘I’ve got biscuits!’ line when I arrived (in compensation for the fact that I'd obviously prepared nothing else for the festival), and it also meant that I got to glean back a bit of moral high ground by giving the other people who’d be working with me dirty looks when they turned up late. First up was Danil, who’d come armed with a hefty bag of expended materials and a list of what could and couldn’t be recycled. He’d decided that the first task in our ‘kvest’ would be to make teams sort the materials into piles of recyclable and non-recyclable materials, and assign them points according to how many they got right. Genius. ‘I’ve got biscuits!’ I said, hopefully.

Just behind Danil were Olga and Masha, who had respectively created an ecological question-and-answer scenario with a points system, and made a bag from recycled materials. ‘I’ve got biscuits’, I said, laughing softly. Olga whipped out a huge biscuit tin ‘so have I. Mine are freshly baked. And I was at work all last night.’ At this point, I slunk away.

Our first visitors were three girls who, disappointingly, didn’t want to do our ‘kvest’. They’d found a cat stuck up a tree, and enlisted us to help rescue it. I’m proud to report that, between us, Danil and I rescued the poor cat. There’s no point getting into the nitty gritty about who climbed trees and who didn’t, let’s just say I took some pretty neat photos.

See?

The ‘kvest’ was a roaring success, no thanks to my post-it quiz. We had a rotation, so teams started with Danil’s sorting task, moved onto Olga’s question-and-answer scenario, watched Masha’s demonstration on environmentally responsible behaviour, and then had a quick look at my quiz if they could be bothered. Each of us assigned them points for their responses, and the winners would get either a re-usable water bottle or a biscuit. It was nothing like the Raven challenge I pictured in my mind when I promised the organiser a ‘kvest’ (I mean I wasn’t dressed as Raven for starters), but it was surprisingly successful nonetheless.

The taxi ride to Danil’s dacha was long. We crossed the Yenisei, snaked through the factories on the opposite bank, took a motorway up into the hills and forests beyond, passed an old airfield filled with the hollow carcasses of helicopters, sped along a small stretch of road high up in the wooded hills, ended up on a very uneven dirt track, and pulled up next to a high wall where the track just stopped. It was literally the end of the road. The taxi was unreasonably cheap, of course. £6 for a forty five-minute ride. When we got out and headed towards the gate, a large hunting dog came running to meet us. ‘I didn’t know you had a dog!’ I said to Danil. ‘Oh yeah I’ve got five.’ He said casually.

Inside the fence there wasn’t just a single cottage, but a patio surrounded by low buildings. There was a kitchen and garage, a house, and, on the right, a second, bigger house, which was still being built. Danil’s mum gave us a proper Russian lunch: salmon and potato soup, caviar, fresh salmon fillets, fresh bread with homemade butter and smetana (like mayonnaise but classier), and Georgian lemonade. It was soooooo good.

‘What typical English dishes are there?’ Danil asked me.

‘Fish and chips.’ I said. ‘That’s about it actually.’

Then we went to see Danil’s dad who was over at a neighbour’s dacha. We didn’t make it past the gate, where a very big, VERY angry dog told us in no uncertain terms to stay away from the house. We climbed over the back fence instead. Danil’s dad, Alexey, was in the front room with his neighbours. They all gave me very firm Russian handshakes, and grilled me about England. One question that came up was ‘What do you think of Boris Johnson?’

‘I don’t like what he’s doing.’ I replied simply. ‘And what do you think of him in Russia?’

‘Durak.’ Alexey replied, even more simply.

‘Durak’ means fool, oaf, buffoon. It’s probably the best, and most economical description of our Prime Minister that I’ve ever heard.

Then Alexey gave me a ‘safari’. He drove me and Danil around his (quite considerable) land in a colossal old red four-by-four. I can’t describe how beautiful the area was. Sitting here now and trying to remember it, my mind can’t conjure up any combination of details which matches the awe that I felt in that car. Autumn made it all the more special, because the trees which lined the majestic peaks around us were all the most brilliant shades of yellow, orange, and red.

There were a couple of off-road moments, where I really did have to hold onto that handle that cars have by the window to stop myself from falling out my seat.

‘Does your dad have a car?’ Alexey yelled over the sound of branches cracking under the wheels.

‘Yep.’ I said, hoping the inevitable question wouldn’t come.

‘What car does he have?’

…

…

‘A Honda Jazz.’

‘HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

HAHAHAHAHAHAH

HAHAHAHA

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH’

Next, we visited a stable in the forest, which felt positively Hansel and Gretel-ey. We fed one of the horses an apple, and petted a cute little pony.

When we were back at Danil’s dacha, a car screamed towards us, leaving a trail of dust, and then came screeching to a halt inches from the gate. It was Danil’s youngest uncle, Vanya, and his partner. After we’d been introduced, Danil said ‘well, Theo and I are going to climb Chornaya Sopka now. See you soon.’

‘Woah woah.’ Said Alexey. ‘Theo, do you really wanna go up Chornaya Sopka by foot?’

‘Yeah.’

Alexey slapped me on the back, laughing. ‘Of course you don’t! Come on, I’ll take you in the car.’

So we all piled into the enormous four-by-four again (me, Danil, Sergey, Vanya and his partner), and we went on the bumpiest car ride probably ever. It made the Top Gear Bolivia Special look tame. I don’t know what that track was designed for, but it wasn’t cars. We met a few quad bikes coming down, and even they were having a lot of trouble negotiating the winding, near-vertical rocky track.

Near the top, you had to get out of the car and climb the rest of the way. The track ended with a clearing where a little party of people were roasting spits of meat over a campfire. Horses were trotting around in the clearing too, and there were a bunch of very muddy dirt bikes in one corner. When we started the climb to the very tippy top, Danil said ‘race you’ and started sprinting over a field of jagged rocks towards the final climb. He made it look easy. It wasn’t easy.

But it was worth it for the top. We got there just as the sun was setting and ate salo (I retract what I said earlier, it’s actually very tasty after a bit of exercise) and bread. The view towards the city was spoiled by the city, in my opinion, but the view in the other direction was one infinite patchwork of undulating red, yellow, orange and green leaves over the most beautiful and dramatic terrain of rolling hills, winding valleys and soaring mountains. It was stunning. And I was stunned. We stayed up there for a couple of hours, but it didn’t feel like that long. I think most of the time I was just standing there trying to compute it all. With hindsight, I think I found it so spectacular because we don’t have any spaces which are that untamed in England. Pylons and the like get in the way, of course, but there are also other things which we might not think about even in the remotest English landscapes. Dry stone walls, for example, or hedges. They’re perfectly natural, and there’s nothing wrong with them, but they’re a subconscious reminder that the land has all been explored, apportioned, cultivated. Here, there’s no trace of human interference whatsoever. We could see for miles from this point, but every inch of visible land was just dense forest if we stood facing south .

When we finally wandered back down to the car, Alexey kept on telling me to get videos and pictures out of the window to send to my parents. He put his favourite playlist on and absolutely caned it back down the track to the dacha. Then one of my favourite French songs from when I was younger (Bella by Maître Gims) came on, and I got very excited. In the fringes of the Siberian taiga just like at school in the fringes of London, I managed to baffle everyone around me by yelling out French rap lyrics. Only here, Alexey turned the volume down so that he could hear me, and then sang along.