Tallinn to Fushiki - Grounded: A Down to Earth Journey Around the World - page 35

THE next morning, we arrive in the city of Irkutsk. You may remember this name as one of the territories
on the Risk game board. I half expected to see ten-foot-tall, plastic Roman numerals wandering the streets.
The main attraction in Irkutsk, as far as Rebecca's concerned, is a small aquarium that features a pair
of nerpas. Nerpas are the earth's only freshwater seals, and they are adorable. They have eyes as dark and
deep as nearby Lake Baikal, where they live. (Lake Baikal is in fact the deepest lake in the world. It's more
than a mile from its surface to its bottom—which at least one Russian minisubmarine has reached.)
The nerpas' “aquarium,” when we find it, turns out to be three rooms in the basement of a strip mall,
located beneath a retail store called Fashion House. The seals' aquatic habitat is essentially an oversized
bathtub. The two nerpas—one male, one female—do a show here every half hour, ten shows a day.
The audience for the show we attend consists of me, Rebecca, and two small children accompanied by
their grandmother. It kicks off with a trainer leading the nerpas through a set of tricks. These tricks include
“singing” (making fart noises through their nostrils); “breakdancing” (turning around in a slow circle);
“painting” (having a brush shoved in their mouths, which they then whack intermittently against a piece of
paper); and “the lambada” (a sort of awkward flipper shimmy).
The promotional brochure at the aquarium claims that nerpas have the power to “hypnotize” people with
their huge, black eyes, and that sometimes the trainer, under the spell of this hypnosis, will begin feeding
the nerpas and then forget to stop. I have no doubt that this is true, as the male nerpa here is so grotesquely
fat he can barely perform any of the tricks. He struggles just to haul his blubbery mass up onto his desig-
nated, floating platform. Mostly, he bobs upright in the water like an overinflated buoy. He has about eight
chins, and his facial expression conveys at all times a childlike anticipation that he might be thrown a fish.
“Except for you,” Rebecca says to me when the show has ended, “that is the most ridiculous animal I
have ever seen. In its defense, it's much cuter than you.”
FROM the aquarium, we go to the Irkutsk regional museum. The exhibit text is all in Russian, but there
seems to be a display about the creation of the “BAM”—the “Baikal-Amur Mainline” branch of the Trans-
Siberian Railway. The BAM breaks off from the main Trans-Sib route and shoots farther north, into the
largely uninhabited wilds of Siberia and the Russian Far East.
Construction on the original Trans-Siberian route (the one we're taking) began in 1891. Czar Alexander
III decided the railway was crucial to both economic growth and military might, as it would connect Mo-
scow and St. Petersburg with the Russian hinterlands bordering China and the Pacific. In 1916, it became
possible for the first time to traverse the width of Russia by rail, from Moscow to Vladivostok.
The idea behind the BAM branch extension was to provide better access to the rich natural resources in
the remoter, northern parts of eastern Russia. Construction on the BAM began in the 1930s but quickly got
bogged down. One major challenge was the region's permafrost, which required dynamiting before tracks
could be laid. For a long time, prisoners (plucked from the Siberian gulags) were the central source of labor
on the railway. Later, idealistic students were encouraged to pack off to Siberia and work on the BAM as
part of a gung-ho national service initiative.
As recently as 1991, large sections of the BAM were still not complete, though with various detours it
was possible to reach the terminus. The whole project has turned out to be costly, dangerous, and—many
would argue—completely idiotic. Still, at least one Russian transportation official wants to double down,
proposing a $50 billion BAM extension that would include an undersea tunnel across the Bering Strait to
Alaska. Were this to happen, you might eventually be able to ride a train from London to New York, the
long way around.
We're currently skirting along the northern edges of Mongolia and China. The freight trains rolling by
in the opposite direction are loaded with hundred-foot pieces of timber and gigantic oil drums. This part