Described by the Russian writer in the late 19th century as the end of the world, Sakhalin, as David Wolman '96 discovers, is also an unspoiled natural beauty.
Story and photographs
by David Wolman '96
Clinging to wet wedges of rock and not trusting the footholds beneath my torn, worn running shoes, I glance at the water and constellation of jagged rocks below. It's only a 9-foot drop, maybe 10, but even a broken ankle on this isolated stretch of coast on the far-eastern Russian island of Sakhalin would be big-time trouble.
Hanging from Siberia like a 569-mile-long forked tongue lapping at the frigid waters of the northwestern Pacific, Sakhalin is known for little in the West except Soviet gulags; Chekhov's nonfiction account of life on this hellish island; Korean Airlines flight 007, shot down near here in 1983; and most recently, huge oil and gas reserves that are the source of much salivation from multinational oil giants. For Jonathan Carver '96 and me, a summer visit to Sakhalin offered an opportunity to explore this corner of Russia's wild east before the approaching development blitz catapults the area into the 21st century.
After living in northern Japan for the better part of a year to study and write about Russo-Japanese relations in this corner of the Pacific, I decided that a trip to Sakhalin would be an appropriate finale. Despite my fear of outdated propeller planes, I bought a ticket for a Sakhalin Airlines flight from Hokkaido's Hakodate airport to Sakhalin's main city of Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk. Jonathan, who had been working in another less-than-inviting Siberian city, agreed to fly in and meet me, providing crucial help in translating the language and culture.
To get a sense of just how far-flung Sakhalin is, consider this: The island is slightly closer to Denver, Colorado, than it is to Moscow. The population is sparse (550,000 people), roads are treacherous; government bureaucracy is ridiculous; forests are abundant; and mosquitoes, nettles, salmon, bears, and blueberries are everywhere.
Getting a visa to visit Russia requires some sort of bureaucratically credible invitation, though most tourism operators can do this. Once in country, foreign travelers to Sakhalin, especially those headed for the backcountry, need to have a Russian escort 24-7 and carry a passport at all times for random checks. (Or at least, that was the rule last summer. Laws are shifty on Sakhalin, and likely shiftier now, after the governor, Igor P. Farkhutdinov, was killed in a helicopter crash in August last year. Carrying one's passport, by the way, is par for the course when traveling in Russia, but the escort law on Sakhalin, I was told, was part of the border oblast's effort to crack down on smuggling.)
Which is how Jonathan and I came to be clinging from these rocks; our personal escort and guide, a native of Sakhalin named Sergey, can move swiftly over cliffs without hesitation. A short, gentle, mustached man, Sergey is a devout Christian, who neither drinks nor smokes. He's also missing the tips of three fingers on his right hand and possesses a thin, muscular physique, hunched posture, and fast pace that reminds me a little too much of Gollum from Lord of the Rings.
He scampers directly under a weathered sign written in Russian that I wish Jonathan hadn't translated: "Do not proceed past this point to the waterfall!" The waterfall, needless to say, is our intended destination. Gingerly rounding the cliff, I see Sergey already descending onto the seaweed-strewn beach, via an old rope, quite visibly frayed, and tied to a chunk of cliff. Unlike Sergey, I'm not so sure God is protecting me on this outing, though I wish I could purchase temporary faith as easily as I purchased temporary travel insurance a few months ago.
Our trip began a few days earlier with a bouncing hourlong bus ride from Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk to the village of Kluchi. Once in Kluchi, most of the passengers headed off to their dachas, or small farm plots, but Jonathan, Sergey, and I proceeded up a long dirt road—until our guide suddenly turned and started bounding down a steep wet slope covered in bamboo that was as tall as our shoulders.
Sakhalin is freezing cold most of the year, but the short summer stimulates hyperactive growth in the understory. The bamboo, ferns, nettles, and other plants create a richly green setting, more reminiscent of the subtropics than the subarctic. It also makes for nightmarish bushwhacking.
Jonathan and I were slipping all over the place, but Sergey only paused long enough to look back over his shoulder to see that we were still within eyeshot.
I was starting to doubt whether I'd be able to keep up with Sakhalin's patron saint of speed-hiking for five whole days, or whether I even wanted to. But moments later we exploded through the undergrowth into a clearing populated with old unused railroad tracks stretching in both directions. Sergey was aware of my interest in Japanese history—the Japanese owned the southern half of Sakhalin until the end of World War II—and he weaved bits of amateur archaeology into our various excursions.
The railroad and tunnels, Sergey explained, were likely built by Korean slave labor brought to Sakhalin by the Japanese. (To the Japanese, the island was known as Karafuto, and some elderly people on Japan's northern island of Hokkaido still refuse to call it anything else.) We also stopped to examine a Japanese bunker. Sergey pointed out that the high-quality concrete used by the Japanese makes it easy to distinguish Japanese from Russian construction.
That afternoon we hiked through more barely penetrable bamboo until the landscape opened again, this time onto a gray moonscape. Volcanic mud was everywhere, and though it almost looked like a giant parking lot in color and flatness, this place was not ugly; it was more like a dark canvas upon which nature will eventually paint new life. The caked, cracked grayness extended northwest down a gentle slope, where all the trees and greenery had been smothered and buried. A handful of Fuji-shaped mounds of mud bubbled every few seconds, but the mud was not hot to the touch. While Jonathan and I explored the terrain, Sergey built a fire and laid out a picnic of tomato and cucumber salad, ham, cheese, bread, oranges, and tea.
The walk back to Kluchi was less taxing, and I was relieved when our path reconnected with a dirt road. But Sergey had other plans for our route home, and again we started bushwhacking downhill. Soon we were in a steep ravine, walking on either side of a rocky stream. I was confident Sergey knew where he was going because he pointed to our goal from the hilltop. Yet I also knew—from the unnerving way he kept pausing to look around—that he'd never been this way before. Still, we pressed ahead.
After maybe 90 minutes of arduous hopping, climbing, and slipping along the stream, through tangled growth and fallen trees, we arrived at a clearing and a few small fields of potatoes. Another five minutes and we were back at the bus stop. While waiting for the bus to Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, we had our first introduction to Sakhalin ticks: three for Jonathan, two for me, one for Sergey. Over the course of our four days in the backcountry, we would pluck a total of 16 of the tiny bastards from our skin. ("Don't worry," Sergey told us, "they're only encephalitic in May." It was July, but I was still worried.)
Exhausted, smelly, and covered with bites, we fell asleep as soon as we returned to our hotel, but there was little time to recover. The following morning we were in a jeep, heading farther north for a three-day backpacking trip to the coastal mountains at Zhdansky.
The hiking at Zhdansky started beautifully, then shot straight upward on what Gollum said was an old horse trail to a former Japanese village on the coast, not far from where we planned to camp. The slopes were colored with the purple flowers of ivan chai, edelweiss, small orange flowers called ogonyok in Russian, and wild, ripe blueberries. Over the mountain ridge, we descended quickly down a trail with more bamboo, then into a forest of fir and birch trees, until we reached our campsite for dinner. The hike was only five or six miles, but we were still in and around tall grasses long enough to befriend a few more ticks: one for Jonathan, three for me, zero for Sergey.
The next morning, we hiked along the beach, and then at lunchtime, while drying our shoes and socks by the fire, a Russian with a goatee, bandana, holey sweater, and rubber boots up to his thighs saw our smoke and stopped to visit our camp. He'd been there fishing (read: poaching) for salmon for a week or so, and he and his friends had run out of tea. Sergey gave him more than half of our supply, and they talked casually for a few minutes about the weather and two small brown bears that had been frequenting the area. Jonathan translated a one-liner from our pirate look-alike visitor that he knew I'd appreciate: "Chem dalsha tem luche—the farther away you get, the better it is."
Fog was thick over the beach, so we started walking south this time, toward the waterfall and the awaiting frayed rope.
The short rappel is cause for pause. Sergey waves us onward from the beach with a niet problem expression, and Jonathan and I both know we're going to proceed; we're just taking stock of how bad the situation is getting. In retrospect, this response—aside from being just plain wimpy—strikes me as one born of privilege. People in Sakhalin, and many parts of Russia for that matter, are so accustomed to bad situations—bad government, bad infrastructure, bad shoes, bad weather, bad toilets, bad ropes—that it's not in their nature to contemplate the negative.
Eventually, we make it down the rope and walk a few minutes along the beach until we arrive at the base of the waterfall. It's hard to see above the overhanging cliff, but the misty, chillingly remote setting is almost mystical. Sergey hops out from the shore to get a better view, jumping on rocks just below the water's surface. We snap some pictures and then begin the walk back to the rope, the cliff and our campsite beyond.
Back at camp, we find the pirate has left us a gift. Wrapped in Jurassic-sized leaves from the forest are three 20-inch salmon and an additional bowl of salmon roe. It seems a disproportionate thank you for a bag of tea leaves, but Jonathan tells me this is a perfect example of Russian generosity (not to mention an indication of how seriously Russians need their tea). Sergey cleans the salmon in the nearby stream, while Jonathan and I work to separate the extracted roe from the clingy membrane holding it together.
We dine on grapefruit, salmon steaks boiled in soup, coal-roasted salmon fillet, salmon roe on slices of bread, and tea with three sugar cubes each. Just past 10:00 p.m., the sky finally darkens. Staring into the fire, my trance is interrupted when I feel a tiny, familiar biting on my shin. The dark tick is easy to spot against my pale skin. I pull it off and flick it into the fire. Then I hold a twig to the coals until the tip is bright red, press it into my shin where the tick had tried to burrow, and think: Cluss would love this. (Middlebury professor Robert Cluss is a Lyme disease expert.)
Wrapped in more leaves, the third uncut salmon is stored under our tent. Though I've never taken a wilderness education course, this fresh-fish-under-the-tent maneuver strikes me as a bad one, particularly in light of reports that bears are in the area. Sergey, of course, isn't worried. He doesn't mention God's benevolence per se, but it goes without saying; I mean, the guy's got a crucified Christ on his watchband. Besides, the bears around here are only young ones, he explains, and the adults stay high up in the mountains. I want to suggest that perhaps the scent of our salmon banquet might influence a change in bear whereabouts, but I give up and say a silent prayer instead.
The next day we pack up camp for the hike down the beach and over the mountains to the road where Sergey's pal will meet us with the jeep. The sun is bright, and Sergey breaks out a pair of huge, green sunglasses that look like the face-shield eyewear commonly worn by Florida retirees.
That night back in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, Jonathan and I book a night at the Sakhalin Sapporo Hotel and head to a café for a late dinner of mayo-cucumber-tomato salad, fried fish or pork cutlets, semi-mashed potatoes, and vodka—200 grams each, or maybe 300, I forget. The vodka leads easily to reminiscing and reflecting, not only about our time in the backcountry with Sergey, but also about our fiancées back home (yes, both Middlebury women), and how the Sakhalin we have witnessed would fit into Ron Liebowitz's post-Soviet geography course.
In two days, we are gone from here, me back to Hokkaido and Jonathan home to Seattle, where the faster pace of our everyday lives will resume, and the taste of wild strawberries and fresh salmon roe, the feel of the wet cliffs of Sakhalin's quiet shores, and the vistas from atop the old horse trail looking west, will all inevitably be compressed into a frustratingly abridged memory of our trip to Sakhalin. But first, one last hike.
The next morning we set out to climb the peak outside town named after Anton Chekhov. By the time we reach the summit, the sky is bright, sunshine is hot on our necks, and the billowy fog in the valley has vanished to reveal the city below. Though we probably could have managed to find the hike on our own, Sergey knows the best trails, and his humor and penchant for lavish picnics make him welcome company. Besides, his close connection to God ensures good weather and protection from bears. I will miss him.
David Wolman '96 is a journalist based in Portland, Oregon.