MO SC O W HOW DO YOU DO... MOSCOW! - Passport magazine

Travel
His “microscopic” riparian resort
offers the chance to go rafting,
mushroom picking, horse riding
and to explore limestone
caves. “If you are getting
dangerously close to throwing
up if shown yet another
onion-domed church or
monument or T-34 tank,” he
suggests “alternatives along
the lines of ecotourism,
participatory tourism, charity
tourism, or just plain weird
tourism.”
Being Europe’s longest river, it’s inevitable
that the Volga ends in superlatives:
the continent’s largest delta disgorging
into the world’s biggest inland sea, the Caspian. It is
one of the most important staging posts for White cranes on
their summer migration from Iran and it is a significant breeding
ground for the most quintessential of Russian fish, the Beluga
sturgeon.
Larissa Basanets’ colleague at the ETC, Tatiana Kalishevskaya,
has just returned from the river’s mouth, where she acted
as an interpreter for a party of Danish ornithologists. “I was
amazed,” she says, “the way the birds communicate with each
other, the way the father brings food for the chicks, argues
with his wife and flirts with the neighbors. It was like a soap
opera … very spectacular, I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Back near Moscow, Alex S brings his boat in to land at the
camp. The golden light and swaying movement of the boat
act as a balm, giving one a soothing wholeness with the
world and with oneself (созерцание (sozertsaniye), the Russians
call it). The singing around the fire seems as natural to
the scene as the birds: ‘Some run after business, some chase
after cash, but I run away from the worry, away from the anguish,
I’m going, going to my dream, of mists and the scent
of the forest …’
2 August 2009
Stressed by city life? This is the cure. P
The Ecological Travel Center can be contacted via its website:
www.ecotravel.ru or on 095 247 1368. Uncle Pasha’s
website is www.unclepasha.com