Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
in a field many times larger than the one we had seen that afternoon; the local river
in flood, and a trip by train to Lake Baikal.
We asked about their singing and they joyfully produced an array of instru-
ments, from an electric guitar to a balalaika, and they played and sang for hours
more.
By the time I finally crashed into bed that morning, I could only think how lucky
we had been to stumble on this family. They seemed to be as happy and content as
anyone in the world.
———
The next morning, after a stately breakfast, we took our leave. The bitumen ended
a few kilometres from the village leaving us to face a long, rough and unfriendly
stretch of dirt road. We said a final goodbye to our small escort of a dozen cyclists
and hooting cars and set out on what promised to be the biggest adventure of all.
We were off to tackle the
BAM
!
The construction of the
BAM
railway was the most expensive single project
in the history of the USSR. Twenty-five billion dollars US had been poured into
the venture and hundreds of thousands of young workers from all over the Soviet
Union had journeyed to the mosquito-infested swamps of central Siberia to force
the line through wild and unwelcoming terrain. It was the dream of the golden
renaissance of the Soviet Union. The youth of the nation would push the line
through to the immeasurable mineral riches of the Lena River basin and open the
doors to the largest mining and industrial development in the world.
The line took twenty years to complete and blew its budget by 1000 percent. By
the time it was finished in the late 1980s the situation in the USSR had altered, and
there was no money left to develop the new mining industries, anyway. Only a few
years after its completion, the icon of the Soviets saw the Union decline and then
fragment in a collapse that shook the world. The workers who hadn't grown old
and died during the construction either gave up on the dream and travelled back to
former lives, or turned their temporary workers' accommodation into isolated vil-
lages to eke out a living from the land.
In the years that followed, the gleaming metal superhighway saw not the count-
less thousands of wagons bearing untold fortunes back towards the rest of the
world, but the odd passenger train and the occasional timber freighter. A decade
later the traffic had picked up a little as the independent opportunists of the new
capitalist regime moved in to log the ancient and unprotected timbers of the taiga.
