Summer 2001, Kyzyl, Russia

By Angie Teater

Like most New Yorkers, pitching a tent is right up there with rebuilding a car engine on my Things I Could Care Less About list. Don’t get me wrong, I respect nature. I can recycle plastic and buy organic food like a pro. I just prefer to sleep in the Great Indoors, where roughing it means staying in a hotel without room service.

Normally, this jives well with my travel habits. But there is nothing normal about a trip to Siberia. Finding myself in the middle of the tundra one summer, armed only with a tent and a group of savvy Russians, I was about to experience a back-to-basics rendezvous with Mother Nature. By all accounts, I was unprepared for anything more outdoorsy then a picnic in Central Park. “The Nature” (as Siberians call it), however, turned out to be anything but a picnic.

Blissfully unaware of our forthcoming wilderness adventure, my group – comprising seven college students – hopped a plane from Moscow to Kyzyl, the capital city of Tuva, a region in Southern Siberia. I know, Siberia isn’t exactly a top-spot location when planning a trip. A little word association: cold, snow, ice, frostbite hypothermia. Looking to spare ourselves the hassle of limb loss to frostbite, we decided to visit Russia in the summer. Good call.

The flight was a frightening lesson in Russian aviation. Giving credit where it’s due, we managed to arrive alive, much to the relief of our hosts, Michael and Heather. Our hotel was a short van ride away, and supposedly the only one in Kyzyl. It was situated across the street from a top-secret, no-longer-KGB building that we weren’t allowed to photograph, talk about, or look at funny. We also had a nightly curfew, which was whatever time the hotel owner decided to lock the exterior gate and go to bed. Oh, and, of course, no room service. But this was a four-star setup compared to our tents in the tundra.

To be fair, we were told that one of our tasks on the trip was to “help Heather with youth camp.” Since the youth in question belonged to a Tuvan church group that Michael and Heather started years earlier, my Americanized mind envisioned singing kumbaya around a campfire and cabins for the camp counselors. I never dreamed that “helping Heather with youth camp” involved wilderness skills and a penchant for bathing in a river. Reality set in the moment our bus groaned to a halt after an hour of off-road driving.

Whooping with glee, the teenagers tumbled out of the bus and scurried around the barren land. There was a river, a few trees, some grass … no cabins, no latrines, no restaurants of any kind. I looked around expectantly, assuming I had missed the campsite. Nope. This was it.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” Natasha, my Tuvan friend, breathed proudly as if showing me a priceless piece of art. My teammates and I glanced at each other, fear in our eyes. Beautiful yes, but we were, for the first time in our lives, truly in the middle of nowhere.

Our Tuvan youth group, on the other hand, seemed right at home. A flurry of activity produced pots, pans, saws, hammers, nails, tarps, tents, and all sorts of materials yanked from the bowels of the bus. I watched, astonished. Saws? For camping?? Sasha, one of the youth leaders, assembled the male members of the expedition and broke them into teams. “You watch,” he encouraged me, grabbing a saw, “we build camp.”

Project One: the kitchen. A little clump of trees was apparently the perfect spot. Timber not considered part of the infrastructure was chopped down. Then the boys hacked off the top of the remaining trees and secured a giant tarp above for a ceiling. Inside the open-air kitchen sat a few remaining tree stumps to put to good use. Two were cut at waist-height, serving as table legs for the board nailed on top. Voila! Kitchen table! Three other stumps were sawed down to knee-level making them perfect little stools. Oh, the hundreds of potatoes I peeled while sitting on those stools.

Project Two: an icebox. Sort of. Directly under our feet was a thick layer of permafrost, refrigerator-cold. A big hole, dug at an angle, resembled an Oklahoman tornado shelter and was deep enough to fit two people. Lined with plastic to keep out the moisture, it became a makeshift cellar for a week’s worth of meat.

Once the food was packed into the earth the teens set to work pitching tents. Up went a pole, over went a tarp, in went the stakes – poof, tent! – one after the other. A little city sprouted across the tundra. They giggled as our American group struggled to set up both of our four-family, royal blue, Wal-Mart monstrosities, brought along courtesy of Heather. In all her wisdom she knew the seven of us wouldn’t last a day in those Soviet era tarp-n-pole shelters. Thanks be to Heather.

The full-force of Siberian Youth Camp didn’t quite hit me, though, until Nature called. The city girl in me cringed. In that moment, I would have traded a lifetime of luxury for one small item: a toilet seat.

Aspiring to maintain a touch of class, I will avoid details about the “facilities.” But I will say this: Whoever invented the porcelain toilet should be hoisted on the shoulders of history and touted as great as a king. Before that guy’s crowning achievement, humanity had what we had that summer: a hole in the ground.

We also had a mosquito problem. Siberian mosquitoes mocked American repellents. Our Goliath death sprays were no match for the tiny hoards of David-esque insects that sought to make a meal of us. Their preferred dining place? The Squatty Potty.

At this point, I probably sound like a whimpering prissy girl. I won’t argue. Adapting to the great outdoors wasn’t easy. But after the initial shock of it all, this city girl actually began to have fun.

Our first night out in the tundra, someone produced a guitar, then another, then another until we had a nightly “dueling banjos” situation with five separate instruments. Those who could sing, sang. Those of us who couldn’t tried anyway. Our voices shot into the nothingness of Tuva, then echoed back to us from the mountains like a ghostly choir. I guess camp really isn’t camp without kumbaya – even in Siberia.

Then someone tapped me on the shoulder. It was Natasha. “Look up,” she said, something us New Yorkers rarely do. So I did. Now, in a big city, the only stars out at night are usually spotted in nightclubs. In Siberia, however, the night sky is nature’s best show. “Look,” I squealed, “the Milky Way, I’ve only seen that in a science book!” To me, it was like seeing a celebrity on the street – strange yet surprisingly familiar. Every evening after that, Sasha stoked a raging fire after the sun sank behind the coffee colored hills and we sent songs into the night.

Days in the wilderness passed lazily, one after the other. As the Russians say, we spent them “communing with The Nature.” We played volleyball with makeshift nets tied between obliging trees and the kids swam in the cold mountain river. Prayers were lifted from places that seemed inherently pure. Afternoon naps were stolen in the hot Siberian sun. Everything seemed so organic. The world around us was fresh and untouched. It felt like we were the only people on earth. We might as well have been.

For the first time in my life, I even hugged a tree. No really, I grabbed it in a sad embrace on our last day of camp as the tents were knocked down and the holes refilled. Though I was excited to return to my normal craze of life, I felt connected to the little patch of land.

“You liked?” asked a girl we dubbed Super Clean, as printed in English on her bright purple hat. She was helping me roll up my sleeping bag. I followed her gaze around the Siberian expanse, again barren after our feverish packing. It hadn’t changed much. But I had. The twists and turns of the river were familiar. Those trees had played games with us. That grass hugged me during sleep.

“I love,” I told Super Clean. The Nature and The City Girl had finally become friends.

Angie Teater is a spirited freelance travel writer living in New York City. Her work has appeared in Student Traveler and Travelhost Magazine.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Monday, February 26th, 2007 | Email This Post

This entry was posted on Monday, February 26th, 2007 at 12:04 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.