Our Aeroflot Yak-80 banked steeply around the steaming summit of Klyuchevskaya so closely it seemed the wingtip would slice its frosted slope.
The 15,000-foot peak, Asia’s largest volcano, was as white and perfect a cone as Mt. Fuji, but unlike Fuji, Klyuchevskaya didn’t stand alone. The mountain was just one of a line of volcanoes that marched to the horizon, a vast white army guarding Kamchatka, one of the last secret outposts of the former Soviet Union.
For most of this century, the Soviets protected Kamchatka so jealously that foreign interlopers, like the unfortunate passengers of 1983’s KAL Flight 007, were shot from the sky. But Kamchatka possessed other secrets besides the nuclear submarine base that prompted the KAL jet’s destruction.
This mountainous 800-mile-long peninsula, which juts into the Pacific north of Japan and west of Alaska’s Aleutian Islands, is one of the world’s last great frontiers, a dramatic wilderness that is home to the greatest concentration of varied volcanoes anywhere on Earth, including more than 30 active peaks and the Yellowstone-like Valley of the Geysers.
The collapse of communism has ended the Russian Far East’s forced isolation. For the first time since the beginning of the Cold War, Russia is opening Kamchatka and the rest of its vast Pacific coast to the world.
To the north lies Chukotka, a tundra-covered land on the Arctic Circle where Eskimo hunters still stalk seals from walrus-skin boats. Two thousand miles south are Vladivostok and Khabarovsk, bustling ports near the Chinese border where cowboy-booted American wildcatters and Korean entrepreneurs are stampeding to scope out the region’s rich stores of oil, timber and gold.
Writer Simon Winchester, watching the foreigners from Tokyo, Seoul and Anchorage surge through the Khabarovsk airport, called it “a place of the Wild West now transferred to the Wild East.”
No place in the Wild East offers more to adventure travelers than Kamchatka. Since the early 18th Century, visitors have acclaimed Kamchatka for its rough beauty, with its volcanic spine threaded with mountain rivers thick with salmon and trout, and Kamchatka brown bears, cousins to America’s grizzly, roaming the stone birch forests.
The rocky coast shelters thousands of seabirds, otters and sea lions; and the Valley of the Geysers, a basin lined with hot pots and fumaroles, offers a glimpse into Kamchatka’s volcanic heart. For all its raw force, it also is surprisingly benign. Although snow lingers through April, Kamchatka lacks Alaska’s icy glaciers; and summer in Kamchatka, its earliest American visitors discovered, is as genial as Europe’s.
George Kennan, a forebear of 20th Century American diplomat George F. Kennan, came to Kamchatka in 1865 as part of an ill-fated effort to build a trans-Pacific telegraph line.
One of the first foreigners to explore Kamchatka, he came expecting “the biting winds of Labrador.” He found those, but he also found a land he likened to Italy.
“We could pick handfuls of flowers almost without bending from our saddles,” Kennan wrote in “Tent Life in Siberia,” a travel classic, “and the long grass through which we rode in many places swept our waists.”
Those meadows bloom today, unchanged from Kennan’s day, and range across a California-sized peninsula that is home to only 350,000 people.
Originally, the peninsula was the domain of two native tribes, the Itelmen and the Koryaks, but the Itelmen have been almost totally absorbed into Russian culture. The Koryaks, who live predominantly in northern Kamchatka, maintain a traditional culture centered on reindeer herding.
Mango, a Koryak professional dance troupe, often appears at public events performing intricate dances depicting legends of their people. But most Kamchatkans are Russians who live in the capital of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatski, where they work in the fishing industry or for the military.
Perhaps because Kamchatkans have been so long denied the pleasure of visitors, they are unflaggingly hospitable, such as the eminent scientists who thought nothing of taking a handful of tourists on a 500-mile flightseeing jaunt in a small jet to show off Klyuchevskaya and Kamchatka’s 200 other volcanoes, pointing out furiously smoking craters and calm turquoise lakes spiked with acids.
Kamchatkans long have loved their fierce land and, with communism’s fall, were quick to realize that its stark beauty could be their most valuable asset.
Russian Premier Boris Yeltsin has pledged to end travel restrictions to Kamchatka by 1993, but Kamchatkans, in their typically independent way, haven’t waited for Moscow’s fiat. Earthwatch and REI Adventures pioneered adventure tours here in 1991 and 1992, with a few small hiking, camping and research expeditions.
The summer of 1993 promises to be Kamchatka’s grand opening, with a half-dozen U.S.-based outfitters offering everything from strenuous mountaineering climbs of Klyuchevskaya to luxury cruises emphasizing Kamchatka’s strategic position on the Pacific Rim, just 800 miles north of Japan.
Kamchatka always has looked more to America than to its European bosses in Moscow more than 6,000 miles away, starting in 1741, when Vitus Bering sailed from Petroavlovsk-Kamchatski to discover Alaska.
In the 19th Century, Petropavlovsk was the Russian empire’s chief Pacific port and a favored haunt of American sable traders and New England whalers.
Even at the height of the tensions after the Soviets shot down KAL 007 in 1983, commercial fishermen from Petropavlovsk would buy Marlboros and Playboy magazines in Dutch Harbor, Alaska.
At first glance, Petropavlovsk looks less like an Oriental port than a suburb of Moscow, with its dreary concrete-slab apartment buildings separated by muddy, treeless yards. But even socialist architecture can’t disguise the glory of the city’s setting, perched on the perfect arc of Avacha Bay with Avachinskaya volcano, a steaming white cone, looming above.
The volcanoes are visible from every point in Petropavlovsk, a natural architecture as inimitably Kamchatkan as skyscrapers are New York or oil rigs are Oklahoma.
Kamchatkans live with their volcanoes like second cousins; when Avacha erupted in 1991, sending cascades of ash onto the city, proud Petropavlovskians sent friends photographs of the towering eruption, as if they were baby photos.
I first saw Kamchatka’s volcanoes in April 1991 while covering the arrival of the first American delegation for Smithsonian magazine. At that time, foreigners were so exotic that we were escorted everywhere by police cars, lights flashing. But in a year Petropavlovsk had been transformed.
In April 1992 I walked through one of the several new post-coup free markets without catching a second glance for my Western coat and haircut; the dubious young men in vinyl fake leather jackets and sweatered grandmothers were far more interested in the piles of hothouse tomatoes and fresh chickens.
The gilded dome of a new Russian Orthodox church rose from a ramshackle fishermen’s neighborhood, and all three of the movies at the theater, one of the handsome pre-revolutionary buildings on Leninskaya Street, were American.
It was a far cry from the bad old days of Soviet tourism, when foreigners were as welcome as cockroaches and Intourist seemed intent on proving that suffering was an essential component of any itinerary.
In Petropavlovsk we were besieged by would-be guides, from former party bosses who looked as if they would just as soon break kneecaps as shake hands to an air-traffic controller who flourished an old View-Master as part of his street-corner presentation. Unfortunately, the only pictures he had were of the Crimea, 4,000 miles away.
Others had more enticing offers. There are few roads, but excursions close to town included skiing at a modern resort north of the city or a picnic on a Bering Sea beach. But it took a short helicopter trip to experience the essence of Kamchatka: flying low over the volcanoes, landing at campsites to hike the Valley of the Geysers or visiting fishing lodges that until recently were reserved for the nomenklatura. With dollars anything is possible.
One of the nascent capitalists was Igor Revenko, 32, an earnest bear biologist who had come to Kamchatka to conduct research at Kurilskoe Lake, a renowned wildlife preserve, and had fallen in love with the landscape and the bears.
Like many Russian scientists, Igor was moonlighting to fund his research; his institute had stopped paying for anything beyond his $12 monthly salary. He agreed to escort us for $50 each, plus $100 an hour to charter an Aeroflot helicopter for the 90-minute flight to the southern tip of Kamchatka.
We toured Kurilskoe, a 6-mile-wide volcanic caldera guarded by the brooding presence of Ilinskiy volcano, from the safety of an aluminum skiff. There were bears everywhere: loping through the stone birch and juniper thickets, wrestling in bear courtship, dozing in the sun, their fur glossy and dark against the whiteness of the spring snow.
In four hours we saw 54 bears, a total we celebrated over fish soup and home-brewed vodka with the scientists of the lake’s fisheries research station.
After spending the night in a small cabin there, we were eager to return to Petropavlovsk in time for Russia’s first May Day without communism. But the day dawned with a 30-knot wind screeching outside and an ominous black cloud hanging over Ilinskiy. There was nothing to do but sit in the warm, wood-heated cabin, drink endless cups of tea and curse myself for not having brought a nice thick novel.
On May Day we breakfasted to the news on Radio Moscow.
“It’s beautiful weather in Moscow today,” the announcer crooned in her elegant Russian. “A gift to the people.”
But in Kamchatka the wind still howled. I was astonished to hear a helicopter just after noon; Anatoly, Kamchatka’s best helicopter pilot, was grinning from the cockpit in his dapper leather coat and cap.
“We were worried about you,” he said. “I will swim like a fish through the mountains to get them.” Swim we did: Anatoly flew so low to the volcanoes that the sulfur fumes rising from the craters burned my nose.
In downtown Petropavlovsk, Lenin Square had been freshly decorated with red May Day banners, but the few celebrants were long gone, off to start their four-day weekend. We decided we deserved a holiday too, and drove a half-hour north of town, past velvety pastures and small creeks where men in shirtsleeves fished and families picnicked in the warm spring sun.
The Paratunka hot springs, one of many small resorts built for Soviet workers, offered two sparkling tile-floored swimming pools, one hot, one very hot. Kamchatkans on holiday spread smoked fish, beer and cucumbers by the side of the pool, and we stood in our bathing suits to snack and share in that most beloved of Russian entertainments, conversation.
The fact that the stone birch trees were still leafless and the woods still patched with snow made the al fresco party even more delicious; after the long dark Kamchatkan winter, May Day was fit cause for celebration even without heroes of the revolution.
Back in Petropavlovsk we repaired to the restaurant of the Octoberskaya Hotel. While the vermilion-haired waitress buried the table under plates of local crabmeat, caviar and salmon, we toasted our adventures with Chilean wine and Kamchatkan beer. Igor brought Irina, 30, his wife, who worked as a dentist for $15 a month.
We talked of her frustrations of practicing dentistry in a country with no Novocain, no rubber gloves and no sterile needles, and admired photographs of her two young children, Katya and Yegor. By evening’s end we were friends.
“Next time you come to Kamchatka, you’ll stay with us,” Irina said, holding my hand tightly as we said goodbye.
Kamchatka hid many treasures, and I had discovered not only giant bears and icy volcanoes but also pioneers with hearts ready to welcome the world that so long had been denied them.
