Back from the tundra

Well, it wasn’t what I had hoped for (a family), but it turned out fine in the end. They asked me not to write too much or post pictures, but I can tell you this much.

I rode on a snowmobile with a few fellows who stopped every 20 min. to get warm/strong (aka drink vodka). At sunset we arrived at the chum where I’d hoped to stay. A motley group waited outside, saying they did not want to host me. So in the dark, I drove with another fellow (the first being too drunk), to another chum 10 km away, where only men worked (and one “chum worker” woman to cook/clean/sew). Here, I found a group of 6-10 mostly welcoming Komi and Nenets men (some occasionally went on holiday to town), who work for about $2/day, live 24/7 together in a chum (which they own along with all their belongings except the deer), and still call their employer the “kholkhoz” (meaning collective Soviet farm). When the directors of the kholkhoz arrived, I had to explain who I was and why I was at their chum, in Russian, which was nerve-wracking. I convinced them I was not a spy, and they let me stay to help build a corral in the forest, drive 3000 reindeer into it to separate into two herds, lasso and tackle deer to the ground, move the herd from one lichen grazing area to another, watch men chop down trees and shape and combine them with only hand tools into sturdy and flexible sleighs (including heat/steam bending the wood over a fire outside), harness reindeer to the sleighs, collect and split lots of wood for the stove (I drove the reindeer sleigh sometimes!), collect water from nearby lakes, and, perhaps most excitingly, take down the chum, load all belongings onto sleighs, and start the spring migration northward, which will bring them 300 or 400 km north to the sea for the summer.

The man who was supposed to come every weekend to check if I wanted to return to the city never arrived (broken snowmobile). So, after a week of waiting fruitlessly when my hosts no longer wanted me there (cause I’m an annoying foreigner who knew nothing about living in a teepee in the Russian forest-tundra in winter), I paid the only herder with a snowmobile to bring me back. It of course broke down partway, so we called the first fellow (now being within mobile coverage), who came and met us in his new snowmobile (he had planned to pick me up the next day). Sitting out in the middle of a frozen marsh in a snowstorm, we discussed the whole situation and made amends.

In this way I spent three weeks in the tundra of Nenets AO, along with eating 5 meals a day of delicious reindeer (mostly boiled, sometimes frozen and raw dipped in blood, sometimes with raw frozen fish too), playing lots of cards (they wanted me to bet away all my belongings), and watching endless World War II movies on their tiny dvd player when the generator they won last year at a reindeer race was running. It was awesome and I feel very lucky it all went well (or at least not as badly as it could have gone!)

I suppose I’ve had quite an adventure.

Now I’ll wash reindeer hairs off of the one set of clothes I wore, watch this year’s reindeer race and national games (on the frozen Pechora River), and fly to Denmark and back to Greenland April 11-May 1. Off to new adventures on the sea ice I hope will last until I arrive!