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Fahrenheit and routinely hover around minus fifty. Albert's family actually lives in a house built on stilts,
elevated thirty feet above the ground, to escape the permafrost of the soil below. At least I think that's what
he's drawing. It's either that or his family lives inside a giant spider.
After an hour or so of pleasant semiconversation, during which at least two-thirds of the sentiments get
lost in translation despite the goodwill and enthusiasm of the participants, it's time to go to bed. Natalia just
falls back on her bunk in her blouse and jeans. Within moments, she's fast asleep. We know this because
she snores with a ferocity that belies her ninety-five-pound frame. Curses—just when we least expect it,
the dreaded snoring stranger strikes again.
THE first dawn light finds us pulling into Vladivostok. We've reached the end of the Trans-Siberian. After
more than six thousand winding miles, Russian trains will take us no farther. It's a bit shocking to see those
endless, parallel rails suddenly come to a halt at the Vladivostok station.
As a major base for the Soviet navy, less than one hundred miles from the North Korean border, Vla-
divostok was completely closed to foreigners (and even most Russians) up until the fall of the Communist
regime in the 1990s. Recently, it's seen a jump in tourism and trade. I arrive with high hopes that it might be
a sort of Pacific Rim melting pot—the cosmopolitan center of the increasingly wealthy Russian Far East,
and the region's main touchpoint for businesspeople and travelers from nearby China, South Korea, and
Japan.
The physical setting of the city is spectacular—a hilly, misty peninsula surrounded by ocean. It looks a
little like San Francisco might look. If San Francisco had been attacked by marauding zombies.
With its rubbled sidewalks, muddy streets, and rampant litter, Vladivostok suffers from the all too com-
mon Russian affliction of municipal deterioration. There is an additional problem here, though: a building
boom gone horribly bust. Next to our hotel, we can see a high-rise under construction. The first two floors
are finished; the next twenty-eight are just roughed-in concrete. The project appears to be ongoing, but
every time we look it's just one guy with a jackhammer, taking long breaks every half hour or so. At this
rate, he should be finished single-handedly constructing this tower by, oh . . . never. And that's not all:
There are three other half-finished towers on this same block. All have wide-open, unenclosed upper floors
with wind and rain rushing through and loose Tyvek sheets flapping wildly.
It's our understanding that there's a ferry from Vladivostok to the west coast of Japan, so our first order
of business is to confirm its existence and get ourselves tickets. We manage to locate the ferry company's
offices in a marine terminal next to the harbor. But the woman at the front desk has disastrous news. The
ferry leaves only once a week, and the next departure is not for four days.
Four days! Phileas Fogg would never stand for this stagnation. He'd be bribing a freighter captain or
somehow commandeering a naval destroyer from the Russian Pacific fleet. But we are not Fogg. Conclud-
ing we have no workable alternatives, we buy two ferry tickets and resign ourselves to an undesired inter-
lude in Vladivostok. As we leave the terminal, a thick rain begins to fall. It will continue to fall, without
cease, for the next four days.
UNLESS you can wrangle a tour of the Russian navy ships in the harbor, the two main tourist attractions
here (aside from the natural outdoor beauty, which is hard to enjoy in this constant drizzle) seem to be the
regional museum and the aquarium. The regional museum is like every other regional museum in Russia:
Creepy taxidermy. Old oil portraits. Dusty maps.
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