Dacha Part 2

On the drive back from Chornaya Sopka, Alexey took us through a neighbour’s honey farm. There were rows and rows of little wooden hives, and a big artificial lake at the end of the track. We got out of the car to admire the lake, and noticed that there was what can only be described as a little floating bandstand bobbing up and down on it. ‘They like to sit out on the float and drink on summer evenings’, Danil explained. Then the owner of the farm came along and started chatting with Alexey. One of the first things he said was that he’d already had three encounters with bears on his farm this year. I suppose it’s not really surprising that a honey farm in the Siberian taiga might just attract some bears, but he painted his story in very vivid, dramatic terms. At one point, if I’m not mistaken, I think he said that a bear got him by the wrist, because he was definitely miming trying to wrest his hand free from some kind of grip. It seemed comically stereotypical to me, but I thought he probably wouldn’t appreciate the humour, so I kept quiet.

The drive home

Then another neighbour came up and introduced himself, and soon the party had decided to migrate inside the bee farmer’s hunting lodge. If that sounds wildly overblown and like the sort of thing you couldn’t make up, it was. There were all sorts of stuffed animals adorning the walls – including a bear. There was also a massive flag of the USSR (I feel like these guys had more of a right to flaunt it than the students in one of my university’s common rooms), and an enormous bust of Lenin’s head (almost as tall as me) against the far wall. Then we all sat down around a very sturdy wooden table and the food came flooding in. Except for the sausage, everything was homemade and homegrown – bread, honey, butter, smetana, mushrooms in cream, tomatoes, pickled cabbage and carrot, pickled cucumbers with berries. Sometimes, at home in England, my parents make minestrone and they call it ‘hearty’. After that meal, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to call any food ‘hearty’ again. It was so stupendously hearty that even pottage and rye bread pales into inheartinificance in comparison. A moment of silence for the late adjective ‘hearty’, which has now been consigned to a cold grave in the shadow of that unbelievable Russian feast.

Turns out they were all big fans of the Soviet Union too. Again, like the whole bears thang, I should have seen that one coming. I really didn’t know what I was unleashing when I answered the question ‘who do the English think won the war’ with ‘umm probably America?’ Bottles weren’t thrown, but we’re talking that level of uproar. Suddenly I had three Russian men and a babushka speaking at me all at once in impressively fast Russian. I nodded my head and said ‘da’ as sagely as I could manage. That didn’t seem to be the answer they were looking for. For the reference of anyone planning on visiting friends in Siberian hunting lodges any time soon, the Soviet Union won the war.

I managed to turn the situation around by saying ‘da’ a hell of a lot of times, and eventually the conversation shifted to English music. Conversation might actually be a generous term. It was really just one of the blokes saying names at me. ‘John Lennon. Ringo Star!! George Harrison… …’

‘Da’

‘Stuart Sutcliffe’

…

‘D…’ PAUL MCCARTNEY!’

‘…a.’

*Meaningful stare directed at me*

‘Yep. Da. Got you.’

When it was time to go, we piled back into the car and Alexey floored it all the way back to his dacha. Then, apparently, it was time for dinner. At this point I was feeling full. That was beside the point. Out came the caviar, the smetana, the salo and bread, the salmon, another type of fish which I’d never tried but was ochen tasty, and a plate of freshly fried kotleti (chicken and vegetable fritters). I just ate.

After we’d polished off the last of our second dinner, Danil chucked a towel at me and said ‘come on, let’s go to the banya.’ Banyas are basically giant ovens which you sit in until you’re feeling uncomfortably hot, and then you sit in some more. If you’re getting bored in a banya, it’s traditional to get a friend to hit you with birch branches (this is considered a massage). In winter, you run out into the snow naked after sitting in a banya for a while. Just to ‘cool down’, you know. I think it says a lot about Russians that their preferred method of relaxation involves a sort of endurance test. I have to say though, I did enjoy it a lot. There is something relaxing about the whole thing – even the birch branch massage. I’m still puzzled as to why you have to wear a hat in a banya though, it seems kinda counterintuitive. There was a point when it was juuuust starting to get unbearably hot and we were all dripping with sweat, and uncle Vanya got up and chucked some more water on the fire. This created a hissing cloud of steam and pushed the temperature from almost unbearable to absolutely unbearable. At this point, the room was so hot that even tipping buckets of cold water over yourself provided no relief, because the water would evaporate and scald you as it steamed off your skin. That was when I tapped out. I wasn’t the first to leave, so I’m pretty proud of myself. It has to be said, I felt relaxed after that, but whether that was the exfoliation or the relief of surviving I really don’t know.

Then Danil and I went back to the kitchen and found a pan full of spaghetti, so we indulged in a sizeable third dinner. I know. Well done me, right? Three dinners might just be a record.

We planned to go on a day trip to a town called Divnogorsk the next morning. The idea was that we were going to go by boat, but, when the next morning came around, Alexey insisted on driving us there (which seems to be a bit of a pattern now).

We had Russian pancakes for breakfast (oh da). In England, you put the filling on the pancakes, and then you roll them up. In France, you put the filling on the crêpe, fold it, and then repeat. In Russia, you dollop a load of filling on a clean plate, scrunch up a pancake, and mop up the filling with it. I like the Russian way. There were two very different types of jam, honey, condensed milk, caviar (honestly what’s with the obsession with caviar?), smetana, and of course, Nutella.

Then Alexey drove us back into town where we were joined by Danil’s friends Matvei and Masha, and we set off for Divnogorsk. The drive took an hour and a half. On the way, we stopped at a village where the writer Viktor Astafyev was born and raised. This was rather strange, because I’d read a bit about his childhood, and I’d mentally pictured it being in a village that looked just like this. There was also a viewpoint overlooking the river Yenisei with a statue of ‘The Tsar Fish’, featured in one of his most famous stories.

I've ticked 'pose with Astafyev's Tsar Fish' off the bucket list!!

We sped through Divnogorsk, and soon a huuuuuge dam came into view. It was the Divnogorsk hydroelectric dam (officially called the Krasnoyarsk Dam, because Divnogorsk is tiny). Alexey dropped us off here and said farewell, and we all started walking back towards the town of Divnogorsk. We started by following a towering fence. When that ran out, there was a concrete slope down towards the riverbank, which was cordoned off by a wire at chest height with a sign on it saying ‘do not cross this line’. The whole place felt positively abandoned, and I wondered who exactly was going to enforce that. Maybe Danil had the same thought, because his foot strayed under the wire into the area that it marked out. Immediately, a booming voice rang out from speakers on the other side of the massive river. It only got as far as ‘DO NOT…’ before Danil had withdrawn his foot and we’d all leapt backwards.

On the path to Divnogorsk, we heard a regular, rhythmic screeching sound. As we got closer to the sound, we also noticed the smell of burning. The source was an unmarked cerulean blue sports car with a spoiler doing narrow figures of eight around two traffic cones. It was going very fast, and it could only make the turns by drifting around the cones. The driver kept on doing the same figure of eight at breakneck speed for about five minutes while we watched. Then he stopped, his tyres already worn down and steadily smoking. He got out the car, collected and stacked the cones, placed them neatly in the boot, and drove off on the empty road towards Divnogorsk at a very moderate speed (to Danil’s great disappointment). If he was just practising, then it must have been very expensive, because his tyres were wrecked by the end of the session.

The walk to Divnogorsk felt like something out of Stand by Me. Other than the four of us, there was nobody to be seen. The river to our left was beautiful and expansive, reflecting the golden hues of the trees on the steep bank opposite. We came across bus stops every five minutes, and they all had the same Soviet era decorations, and the exact same Instagram handle graffitied on them. After a while, Danil and Masha picked up sticks and started hitting each other with them. It was all very outdoorsy.

The riverbank in Divnogorsk itself was magnificent. Overlooked from the other side by a steep rocky slope covered with autumnal trees. But Divnogorsk was very small, and it ran out after about five minutes of walking along the bank. So we decided to head away from the river to see what we could find. We found some very crumbly looking blocks of flats, a shop which looked like it was made out of bright orange lego bricks with the single word ‘oranges’ on it, and a kebab place which was out of chicken, so we settled for beef, which wasn’t great.

Not a bad view to have from your front door

Um. Ok?

Then we found the train station just in time for the train home (the only one from Divnogorsk to Krasnoyarsk that day). The train only has four carriages, and has been waiting on the platform in the sleepy town’s station all afternoon. The ticket office in the station was closed, so a guard has to walk up and down the train collecting money (the fare for an hour-long ride is about 25 pence). What a great two days. The challenge now is to try not to fall asleep on the train…