Usually it is the foreigners who surround the world’s deepest lake in winter. But with so many borders closed, Russians are coming to the draw to make ticket videos and take Instagram photos.
On Lake Baikal, Russia – she traveled 2,000 miles for the moment: hanging the sunroof of her white Lexus SUV shining under the dark sun, facing the smartphone’s selfie camera, bass thumping, tire scratching, cutting donuts on blue-black, cutting white donuts.
“It’s for Instagram and ticket ok,” said Gulnara Mikhailova, who arrived at Lake Baikal with four friends from the remote Siberian city of Yakutsk for two days and two nights.
It was almost zero degrees Fahrenheit, as Mrs. Mikhailova, who works in real estate, was in a swimsuit, leaning on the roof of her car and posing for pictures.
This is the winter on the world’s deepest lake, the 2021 epidemic.
Tour guides are calling it the Russian season. In general, it is the foreigners – many from nearby China – who go skating, biking, hiking, running, driving, hovering and skiing on the Siberian lake Baikal at this time of year, on a very wide expanse of snow and ice, while the Russians survive the cold. Turkey or Thailand.
But Russia’s borders are still closed due to the epidemic, and to the surprise of locals, crowds of Russian tourists have traded tropical beaches along the icy-dotted shores of Baikal.
“This season is like no other – no one expected such a crush, such a tourist boom,” said Yulia Mushanskaya, director of the History Museum on Olkhon’s popular Baikal Island.
“People who work with tourists are just shocked,” she said.
If you find a moment of peace on a crescent-shaped, 400-mile-long, mile-deep lake, the attack on the senses is another universal. You stay solid on three feet of ice so that it is safely crossed by heavy trucks, but you feel fragile, fleeting and small.
The silence around you is interrupted by cracking down every few seconds – groceries, bangs and weird, techno-music twings. Look down, and the imperfections of the glass-clear ice emerge as pale, shimmering curtains.
Yet stability is hard to come by.
Western governments have been frustrated by travel during epidemics, in Russia, as often happens, things are different. The Kremlin has turned border crossings related to the coronavirus into an opportunity for Russians – who have spent the last 30 years exploring the world beyond the former Iron Curtain – to burn at home on holiday.
The state-funded program, launched last August, offers 0,270 refunds on domestic leisure trips, including flights and hotel stays. Russia, one of the world’s highest coronavirus deaths last year, is an example of how the economy has often prioritized the economy over public health during epidemics.
President Vladimir V. “Our people are used to traveling abroad to a significant degree,” Putin said in December. “Developing domestic tourism is no less important.”
Recent months have seen a significant crush on tourists on Black Sea beaches and Caucasus ski resorts. The period of the Defender’s “race holiday” on February 23rd (when Russia celebrates Men’s Day) and March 8th (International Women’s Day), this winter, is the place to become a fox, Baikal Lake.
It’s the distillation of tourism in the Instagram era.
Some visitors bring their own smartphone tripods, repeatedly jumping down for a full snapshot of themselves in the media before the ice wall. Other pilots carry drones or arrange brightly colored smoke bombs.
At a recent sunset, a line of tourists placed their thorns inside a natural rose in a thorny strip on a frozen lake, with pictures of rose-glitter hanging from the ceiling.
“Get out!” Some were devastated when the second group arrived. “You all get a salary! You are blocking the sun! ”
“All of this has happened through social networks,” said Elvira Dorzieva, Grtto’s guide. “These are the top places, and it’s like this – ‘I just want to focus on what I’ve seen online.'”
The most in-demand photos include clear snow, so some guides keep a brush for snow sweeping.
Nikita Bencharov, who learned English to compete in international table tennis tournaments in the Soviet era, runs a sprawling hotel complex on Olakhkhn and estimates that more than 70 percent of winter visitors in a normal year are foreigners.
This year, almost all of its guests are Russian, which presented a bit of a problem. Russians on holiday abroad are used to cheap, comfortable accommodation, which is hard to find in remote parts of their own country. In Olakhhon hotels this season, the frustrating double room goes up to 200 a night; At some cafes, there are outdoor pit toilets where the toilets are not heated.
“Foreigners are already a bit ready and thank God there’s a normal bed here, at least, and that they don’t sleep on the barracks,” Mr Bencharov said. “They understand better than the Russians where they travel and why.”
Many tors operators are designed to accommodate the attention of foreign tourists. On the other hand, the once Chinese rest restaurant Runt now serves Borst.
At the northern tips of the island, where the Orange Cliffs Tower stands on a blue-and-white labyrinth of ice formations, the tour van’s fleet gathers hundreds of people in the surrounding slide and clamber, and then slides the hot fish soup straight from the fire burning on the ice.
A couple from Moscow, two of their 30s engineers, said it was their first visit to Siberia. AK said he was thrilled with the landscape but was amazed by the poverty in the area and felt sorry for the people and how they have to live.
About 500 miles away, in a fishing camp around the lake, three men snuggled into a metal hut on the ice, the inside air smelling of healed fish in a plastic bottle on the floor, wet bed and pine-nut moonshine. Two firefighters said they earned as much as $ 300 a month and took several weeks to supplement their income by harvesting pine nuts in the woods.
“We at least do and complain and complain – and that’s it,” said Andre, 39 of the firefighters. “And, what, we hear Putin on TV …”
Laughing in panic, he trialled his voice. He refused to give his last name out of concern for revenge in his government job.
The alien landscape of Baikal offers protection from troubles and crises – temporary and, perhaps, deceptive. Coronavirus, for one, does not exist, it seems that tourists and visitors packed into tour restaurants do not mask the sight. His dismissal stance reflected an independent poll this month that found that less than half of Russians were worried about catching the virus and only 30 percent were interested in getting a Russian coronavirus vaccine.
“It’s a psychosis,” said Elena Zelenkina, a park ranger, about the global danger of the virus when she served tea and homemade dutt nuts in a gift shop next to a hot spring on the quiet east bank of the lake.
The group of musicians in the nearby city of Irkutsk also went ahead with their annual indoor winter festival. One of the spectators, Artem Nazarov, was from Belarus – one of the few countries whose citizens can now easily enter Russia.
Like Russia, Belarus is beset by anti-government protests. But like Mr. Putin, Belarusian President Alexander G. Lukashenko has shown pressure to spread unrest. Mr Nazarov said he had supported the opposition but felt his victory was neither near nor certain, so he was moving forward.
He spent a joyous week walking and skating around Olkhon. He was waiting for more outdoor tourism in Iceland if he would open borders on Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula.
“We all have our dreams and our goals that we want to achieve,” Mr. Nazarov said. “Let life go.”
Oleg Matsnev contributed research from Moscow.
