Drifting

I might be wrong, but I don’t think I’ve told you about my trip to Kiril’s dacha yet. If I have, do me a solid and pretend I haven’t. Can’t be bothered to look through previous blogs, and I think my memory’s going (aged 20 – I had a good run).

Almost two weeks ago, Zuzana and her mentor Lena invited me along to a board games evening at Lena’s friends’ place. Kiril and Masha are Master’s students at the main uni in Krasnoyarsk. Neither of them studies English, but they both speak it excellently. Also, Kiril has a car, which scores him lots of friends points. The games night was fun, although we never got round to playing the games because we were so preoccupied trying to make pancakes in a pan which had lost all its non-stick (I’m gonna go ahead and declare myself Pancake King for achieving that… although only after about two hours of trying). By the time we’d cooked all the pancakes/pancake scraps, fried some mushrooms, filled the pancakes with them, and shallow fried the finished product, we were too tired to eat them. Instead, Kiril offered to drive us to the ‘Beautiful Bank’. I didn’t know what the Beautiful Bank was, but it sounded like a suitably self-confident name, so I gave it the benefit of the doubt. It was indeed beautiful (you’ll be surprised to hear), with a wide view over the river, the city, and the columns of rock in the national park beyond. Then, to my astonishment, Kiril drove all of us home. Legendary move from Kiril, which must have added around an hour to his drive home.

The Beautiful Bank

The next day, Kiril invited us to his parents’ dacha. It was at precisely the opposite end of town to Danil’s parents’ dacha, and a marginally shorter drive (about forty-five minutes). As the houses began to thin out, and the forest began, Kiril asked ‘is drifting a popular sport in England?’

‘Drifting in cars?’ I asked.

‘Yeah.’

I didn’t know drifting in cars was a sport.

‘I don’t think so.’ I said, uncertainly.

‘In Russia it’s popular.’ Kiril said, with a hint of pride in his voice. ‘Krasnoyarsk is the Russian capital of drifting. Lots of world champions came from Krasnoyarsk.’

I’m not going to pretend I wasn’t a bit concerned that the guy driving us around seemed so enthusiastic about drifting.

The road became rough and littered with potholes. ‘These are real Russian roads.’ Lena said, sarcastically.

Kiril laughed. ‘Not yet.’ He said.

Five minutes later, the road just stopped. Dropping steeply over the hill ahead of us was a dirt track hemmed in by dense pine forest. Kiril braked and paused for a minute, changing gear, like a roller coaster carriage suspended teasingly above a near-vertical drop. Then his little VW clunked up a gear and he stamped on the accelerator. ‘These are real Russian roads.’ He said. ‘Welcome to Russia.’

Once we’d been screaming down the deteriorating stony track for a few minutes, I shouted ‘isn’t this bad for your car?’ to Kiril. He ignored me, or maybe he didn’t hear me over the screeching of brakes at a bend in the road. We climbed out of the forest and into a field, where there was a magnificent open view of the Yenisei over our shoulders. Then we plunged back into forest again. But soon a rhythmic clunking could be heard. A rock had got stuck in the wheel. We had to put the car up on a jack and take the hub cap off. Annoyed as I was by the delay, I couldn’t help but feel a little bit smug.

Another short drive, and we were at the riverbank. Ironically, this bank was more beautiful than the ‘Beautiful Bank’. The leaves had almost all disappeared from most of the trees, so there was an uninterrupted view of the sweeping river and the hills beyond. We walked to the dacha, where highlights included a cup of tea and a really fun improvised swing for the child within me. On the walk back, we stopped off at ‘the cleanest spring in Krasnoyarsk’, which tasted like soot. Hmmm.