Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
I
WAKE UP
on the train a half hour before arriving in Novosibirsk and can think of only one
thing: how excited I am to see Rose. She has been working around the clock preparing to
open her new restaurant but was able to escape for a week to join me. She lands in midafter-
noon.
The weather is ominous. There appears to be more snow piled up outside than there was
in Ishim, far more than anywhere along the trip. And it looks bitterly cold. Rose will be just
thrilled.
This trip has not been nearly as cold as in 2011, when I had a close encounter with frost-
bite. We were in the city of Ulan-Ude, near Lake Baikal in eastern Siberia. Sergei, Rose, and
I hired a driver/guide named Yuri. The retired construction engineer was wearing no gloves
with temperatures hovering around thirty below zero Fahrenheit and a stiff breeze blowing.
I wanted to be as tough as Yuri.
The problem was not my hands, though, but my feet. Yuri's van had odd amenities, in-
cluding flowing green curtains and green fabric covering the dashboard, but it lacked reli-
able heat. During the drive, cold from the floor seeped through the soles of my boots, which
were winterproof only by the standards of the department store in New York where I bought
them.
At one stop Yuri looked at my boots and gasped. He then grabbed a spare pair of knee-
high boots—
valenki
in Russian—made of tightly packed felt and noticeably lacking style.
The word for this type of Russian boot—the singular form is
valenok
—is the same word
used in Russian to describe a “hick” or “country bumpkin.” That did not dissuade me in the
slightest. I wore Yuri's
valenki
the rest of the day, and I can only imagine how much pain
I was spared. Chekhov, on his travels, wrote of relying on these felt boots in Siberia—and
that was in
May
. And so, here I was, in one sense—the only sense—walking in Chekhov's
shoes.
Even with that recovery, my feet were a dark shade of blue when we returned to the
hotel, and I had to run hot water over them for a good half hour before normal color and the
ability to feel returned. The way of life in Siberia is built around cold. Unimaginable cold.
And many say that trading secrets for survival, helping one another, made people closer and
formed the foundation of communities here.
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