Theo Gets Attacked by Vicious Beasts in the Wilderness

On Friday, I went on another walk in Stolby with the wonderful Eldar. I knew this was going to be a bit of a trek, but I think perhaps I underestimated quite how long it would be. The path took us up a gravel track (gravel in Russian is ‘graviy’, which is kinda confusing because did they get it from the English or not? Couldn’t it at least be ‘gravil’ and then there’d be no room for confusion?).

Then we climbed up onto a boardwalk which was lined with pictures of all the things that could kill you in the national park. The boards were evenly spaced so that, just as the trauma of seeing a picture of a snarling brown bear was beginning to subside, you’d be put back in your place by an image of a wolf glaring right at you. On the way up, we saw a woman being taken down in a stretcher. After a slightly intimidating array of unidentifiable but very angry looking mammals, I was relieved to see some pictures of rather cute looking bugs. Eldar pointed some out saying ‘these are parasites. They give people diseases. Some people die.’

I’m proud of myself because I definitely could have reacted to that worse. As it was, I just froze and whimpered every time I heard a branch crack, and started frantically trying to hit my back (very hard to do btw) every time a leaf fell down my top.

On the way up the hill, which was becoming increasingly densely forested, we walked past a children’s play area with a sign saying (unsurprisingly) ‘Children’s play area!’ immediately above another sign saying ‘BEWARE – BEARS’.

The boardwalk became a steep set of steps, which joined a final gravel track. By the time we got to an opening with a low ropes course and some picnic tables at the top of the hill, I was regretting wearing so many layers. I decided to lose my heavy coat and my jumper, and shoved them in my bag. Eldar looked at me in my T-shirt sweating and panting. ‘Are you sure it’s a good idea to lose all those layers so quickly?’

I smiled at him patronisingly. ‘Yeah I’m sure, the sun’s out today!’

Softy Russians, I thought, all wearing huge coats on a glorious October day like this.

Two minutes later I was shivering and hugging my knees, my jumper and coat both back on and zipped up to my chin.

The guy sitting at the next picnic table along from us was wearing khaki and carving slices off a giant block of salo with a pocket knife.

‘Eh boys,’ he said, ‘want some salo?’

We both passed, and the man looked crestfallen.

‘Nobody seems to want salo today.’ He said, dejected.

Another man with a great big bushy beard who’d been sitting at the table to our left had been taking swigs from a flask for the five or ten minutes that we’d been there. He looked half-conscious, and frankly he was a bit of a mess. I was expecting him to pass out or something, but he surprised me by putting his flask in his bag, getting up, walking over to a tightrope suspended between two pines as part of the low ropes course, leaping nimbly up, and balancing on it expertly. He was still balancing a couple of minutes later as we pressed on up another set of steps towards First Stolb.

‘Stolby’ means pillars, and ‘stolb’ is the singular (pillar). This refers to the soaring rock formations that are scattered throughout the park, each with its own name. The first one you encounter on a hike through central Stolby is, unimaginatively, called First Stolb. Its name isn’t much, but First Stolb is a sight to see. It’s eighty metres of sheer rock with a couple of other rocks balancing inexplicably on top. There’s a rather blasé attitude among most of the Siberians I’ve talked to about this that you can climb it fairly simply without ropes or anything, nobody’s described this approach as ‘safe’, but I think that’s beside the point.

Then Eldar used a maps app on his phone to find a circuit which we could take, which would bring us back down into the city at a ski resort called Bobrovy Log. So we followed the signs for Bobrovy Log, and I breezed past them without so much as glancing at the distance remaining to the resort. Eldar later insisted that they said the distance was seven kilometres at the beginning of the path, which I find unlikely considering that, an hour and a half later, they indicated that there were eight kilometres still to go. Until now, the distance hadn’t bothered me at all, but the thought of another few hours walking on the same endless path was starting to feel unwelcome. There was variety at the beginning – we walked past some more pillars of rock, and the types of tree changed from pine to birch, but soon dense pine dominated again, and the path became unvaried and undulating.

Eldar and I tried naming as many English and Russian colours as we could, but every time he said a Russian colour, I’d frown and go ‘what?’, and every time I said an English colour, he’d frown and go ‘what?’ Also, colours are ridiculously hard to describe in simple terms – try it.

Just as I was beginning to get bored, the path went over the crest of a small hill, and we saw a vibrant, fiery orange light on the horizon, bursting through the gaps in the trees. It was sunset, and on a clear day like this, it was spectacular. We deviated from the path a little in the hope of finding somewhere to see the sky uninterrupted by trees, and we were rewarded with another medium-sized, scalable rock. The view from the top was unreal. I’ve seen some great views in the month that I’ve been here, but this one takes the prize hands down. The sunset was a deep orange hue, not light, but really bright. It painted a vivid streak on the horizon, and it also gave a mysterious smouldering filter to the landscape below, so that the carpet of pine trees, which looked like something out of a dinosaur film because it was so expansive and unspoiled, took on a halloweeney hue, like a valley of glowing green-brown embers.

Not quite a wolf but he did try to peck me so I'm reserving the right to say I was attacked by animals in the Siberian taiga...

For the rest of the walk, I was torn between amazement at the beauty of the park by twilight and fear that it was getting dark and I’d probably be eaten by bears. But it wasn’t long before we got to the ski lifts at Bobrovy Log, which were to take us back down to the city. Only they were closed. As we approached, the man locking them up shouted ‘I’m closing, walk down the slopes.’

‘Ok thank you!’ Eldar shouted back.

I looked at him quizzically. ‘Thank you?’

‘Yeah it’s ironic. I don’t mean thank.’

The ski slope was really thanking hard to walk down. It was super steep, super long, and (slightly alarmingly for a ski slope), consisted mainly of scree and jagged rocks. By the time we got to the bottom, I was absolutely dying for some food. We took the bus to KFC and I had nine chicken strips, large fries, a milkshake and garlic sauce. I don’t even know what chicken strips are meant to be called in English, because this was my first proper experience of KFC. Comes to Russia, has KFC. #cultured