REPOUR originals by Janick Lemieux and Pierre Bouchard
Russian Far-East
The Kuril-Kamchatka Trench is a 10,000 metre deep underwater ditch where the Pacific Plate is being subducted beneath the Okhotsk Plate. The forces in presence create a volcanic arc that stretches from Japan to the Aleutian Trench, home to hundreds of fierce mountains of fire and one of our planet's hottest spot. The active volcanoes hiss, puff, and explode on the 56 Kuril Islands spread over 1,300 kilometre of choppy water and on the remote peninsula of Kamchatka. In short, one of the most logistically challenging parts of our « circum-pedalling » the Pacific Ring of Fire! The hurdles start while shopping for Russian 90-day business visas— we need business visas because tourist visas are only good for 30 days. Remnants of the Soviet system prescribe that visitors apply equipped with an « official invitation from an organization authorized to invite business visitors to Russia ». The invitation letters are easy enough to buy online. That is if you are only interested in visiting St-Petersburg and Moscow's architectural wonders. But our need to enter Russia's FarEast, and roam unsupervised on Kamchatka and along the sensitive Kuril Islands, lands us outside the box. Weeks—and three hundred dollars!—later, we receive two offical invitations from a « resourceful » Vladivostok-based travel agent and run with them to Sapporo's Russian Consulate. The Eins Soya, of the Higashi-Nihonkai ferry fleet, takes five hours to link Wakkanai—Japan's northernmost town—to Korsakov, on Sakhalin Island. We sit inside the spotless ship, nibbling on over-packaged seaweed snacks, and look out to what looks like dilapidated and ramshackle port facilities—any time spent in Japan, a country seemingly affected by OCD, can warp one's perspective on the inevitability of rust! The equally rundown bus taking us from the wharf to the immigration facilities, located inside the terminal, is as smile-enducing as the heavily made up lady wearing a tight military uniform and high heels that escorts the twenty-odd passengers, mostly Russian returnees ladden with boxed electronics. The customs forms are in either Russian or Japanese, the border procedure is thus waived for us—with a bit of embarassement on the officer's part! Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, the island's largest city, is an easy 60-kilometre ride to the North. Boomtown since the mid-nineties—due to large reserves of oil and gas exploited by ExxonMobil and Shell off Sakhalin's northeast coast—, this is where we have to register our visas with the authorities, find a way to Kamchatka, and obtain special permits to visit the Kurils. Ten days later, we are occupying a room at the Sakhalin
MAY 2009 PEDAL
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