Today we went on a tour of the Tunkinsky Valley that
separates the New Sajan Mountains—a ragged mountain chain that has magnificent
peaks and extends almost all the way to Mongolia, 100 km away—from the Old
Sajan Mountains, which are a denuded range of small rounded hills. The front of
the New Sajan Mountains looks very much like eastern scarp of the Sierra Nevada
of California, and I suspect that the valley we will be following—pompously
referred to as the Valley of Volcanoes in the tourist brochures—is a half
graben formed by extension and the rise of the mountains.
Our host Igor is also our guide for the day. He is a happy
soul who speaks just a little bit of German, but that doesn’t slow him down in
keeping a torrent of information flowing in rapid fire Russian, who our
translator Lara somehow manages to process in real time. Igor is 55 years old,
and together with his wife runs a comparatively large guest house. Right now
they have ourselves and a group of 20 youngsters from a hockey team, so the
place is buzzing with activity.
Our first stop was of great interest to me. It was in the
uphill end of the town of Arshand, where in 2014 a debris flow came down from
the mountain and hit a new apartment building with a wave of mud and debris
that left a mud mark 5 m high all along the side of the building. The windows
imploded in the ground floor, but the building held otherwise and the loss of
life was limited to the disappearance of a curious observer. The debris
adjacent to the building has now been removed, and the town built a diversion
channel that appears narrow and insufficient to my eyes (unfortunately they are
operating under the often held belief that such an event only happens every 50
to 100 years, so there is only so much money they want to spend in it).
A big thing here in the park is to take the waters. We
traveled a good 30 km—enjoying fantastic views of the Sajan Mountains—just to
reach a spring that is claimed to be good for all sorts of ailments. “Drink,
drink” Igor recommended emphatically, so we dutifully filled our water bottles
with crystalline Sajan water.
At the far end of our excursion we visited a
Buddhist/Shamanic temple that is reportedly one of the very sacred places of
Siberia. It is Saturday and a big ceremony was underway, with five or six monks
singing prayers and blessing the many offers of food that the faithful had
brought with them. They were older men in saffron and scarlet robes, and had
the funny characteristic that each of them was wearing a different type of
tattered had, including a typical Tibetan hat and a hunters cap.
We have definitely crossed and ethnic line in coming to the
Tunkinsky National Park. The folks here are definitely Asiatic in origin,
although they look a bit different than the folks in Mongolia. Locally they are
referred to as “mountain men” or Buriats, and according to Igor they refused
being incorporated to the empire of Gengis Khan, who coined the word “buriats”
to refer to them as “traitors”. Eventually this same people sent word to the
Tzar in Saint Petersburg to request becoming a part of the Russian empire, who
agreed and sent the Cossacks in the 17th century to annex Siberia.
On the way back we stopped at Orlik, a hot springs resort
town, where hundreds of families had come to spend the weekend. Lunch took a
while because all the small restaurants were super busy. Likewise, the hot
spring pool was crowded but we all had a kick very seriously taking the waters.
Our final stop was at one of the six small basaltic cinder
cones found near Arshan. I was hoping for something unique that I could impress
my fellow travelers with, but no, it was a pretty run of the mill cinder cone
without crustal or mantle nodules, nor cool bombs. Igor was very proud of their
cinder cones, however, so we all admired the outcrop and took many pictures.
It has started to rain, so we are not sure what we will be
doing tomorrow.
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