From Houston to Sydney 2013
Russian Far East - 2014
Today I learnt how to define a mid-summer’s day weather in Magadan ; cold, wet and foggy. Temperatures ranged between 8 and 11 degrees Celsius, it rained for about 85% of the day, and at times the clouds were so low that they obscured not only the surrounding hills, but also the tops of the cathedral and several of the five storey buildings.
Of course, the weather didn’t stop us exploring Magadan, but it did affect the things we could do to some extent. The buffet breakfast in the hotel was fairly basic, comprising a cooking pot of liquidy porridge, some hot sliced pressed meat, some cold sliced pressed meat (from the same pink 4cm diameter sausages), some sliced cheese with a plastic-like texture (and taste), some luke-warm fried eggs, and a choice of tea or instant coffee with dry bread. I was fairly hungry, so I seemed to enjoy it more than many others, which was not very much.
We were due to meet at 10:00am, so I took the time to have a short post-breakfast walk, just a short distance to the nearby housing estate with the jet fighters.
When we met at 10:00 am, the fog and rain seemed to be getting worse, but nonetheless we headed into the thick of the fog to Magadan Harbour to see the place where the prisoners to the gulags arrived. Unfortunately, the fog was so thick we couldn’t see the harbour, but we were able to admire a roadside sculpture of a mammoth made from various pieces of scrap iron and disused engine parts.
As the fog and the rain intensified, we headed (inexplicably I thought) up into the rain and clouds to the summit of Krutaya Hill, which overlooks Magadan. Needless to say, we saw no views of Magadan from the centre of the rain cloud in which we found ourselves situated.
There was, however, a second and more significant reason for visiting the hill, which was to see the huge concrete memorial to the victims of the gulags. Known variously as the ‘Mask of Sorrow’ or ‘Mask of Grief’, the 18.5 metre high monument was constructed of monolithic concrete and opened in 1996. Today, it is one of the symbols of Magadan (the other being the city’s emblem, the deer).
Although we could hardly see the monument because of the thick fog and the steady rain, even when we were standing right in front of it, it was evident that this was a very evocative work of art. It showed a bisected human head. On the left side is a torrent of ears representing the faces of people tortured to death. In the empty right eye socket is a camp’s ship bell and a prisoner’s number (937).
We were able to climb some steep stairs and enter the inside of the monument where there is a reconstructed solitary cell and part of a camp cemetery. As we emerged at the rear of the monument, we saw a bronze sculpture of a young woman weeping, and above her, a huge non-canonical crucifix.
We returned to our bus and descended from Krutaya Hill down into Magadan city where we drove along several of the streets. The orginal intention had been to do a walking tour, but we were able to manage only a small sub-set of the planned walk when the rain eased off for a little while.
Our next stop was a public square where the statue of Lenin was relocated a few years ago when the Trinity Cathedral was built. We learned that this was perhaps the last such statue of Lenin to be erected before the collapse of the USSR at the end of 1991; this statue was only erected (in its original location) in late (I think October) 1991.
There was an interesting ecological process underway during our visit. We were wondering why there were half a dozen or so mangled, half eaten dove carcasses lying around in the square, when we spotted the reason. Magadan has flocks of huge killer seagulls. Roughly double and triple the size of any seagull I have ever seen in my life, theses bird attack, kill and eat the other birds in the city. As we drove away we saw the government workers arrive to clean up Lenin’s head (wipe away the seagull droppings) and remove the remains of the dead dove carcasses.
Our final stop before lunch was a visit to the workshop of a man who makes artistic carvings out of mammoth and walrus tusks. It is interesting speculate on whether these carvings would be permitted imports into countries that have banned the import of ivory. On one hand, mammoth tusks are ivory, but on the other hand, they are clearly (no longer) an endangered species, and there could be no suggestion that the mammoth was killed for its ivory.
Lunch, which began at 1:00 pm, was at an ornate restaurant known as the Green Crocodile. Everyone was finished by 2:00 pm, but the bus was not due back until 3:00 pm, giving everyone an hour to explore the nearby markets or whatever. I decided to post a postcard, a process that should have taken just a few minutes but took the entire hour. (It sounds a little like one of those ‘how many people does it take to change a light bulb’ jokes – how long does it take to but one stamp for a postcard in Magadan? – Answer: almost an hour).
There was no line at the post office when I arrived (although there was when I left!). The lady behind the counter had to phone some high office somewhere to find out the cost of the postage; that took 15 minutes). Then we had to register the name of the recipient on her computer (using software that she clearly did not understand), produce a special adhesive barcode label, then receive payment, calculate the change, count out the change, then get the stamps ready, starting a completely new calculation on her calculator each time she added one more stamp to the growing pile for the postcard (with a finished total of five stamps). To save time, worried that I was going to be late back for the bus, I politely refused her offer to stick the stamps on the postcard and I did it myself; I’m quite fast at that sort of thing, and based on my observations of her other work, I am fairly sure that she is not).
After lunch, we had a two hour visit to the regional museum. I’m not a big fan of museums, but given the weather outside, I was able to approach it with a genuinely positive attitude. The museum was actually quite interesting, even though we visited just four rooms during our visit (there is also a fifth room, with a rocks and minerals theme). The first room’s exhibits comprised a collection of photos, maps and articles showing the early settlement of Magadan and its focus on mining. The second room showed the history of the gulags, highlighting the miserable conditions there. The third room looked at the customs, artifacts and cultures of the region’s indigenous peoples, while the fourth focussed on the region’s wildlife, using an impressive collection of stuffed animals and mammoth remains.
We returned to the hotel at a little after 5:30 pm. From my window I noticed that the day was brightening slightly and the fog was lifting a little from Krutaya Hill. I decided to take a walk from the hotel up to the Mask of Sorrows to see if I could get a better look at it (not difficult, as we could hardly see it in the morning’s rain and fog). The walk each way was 45 minutes, so I was away for two hours (6:00 pm to 8:00 pm).
The walk to the monument was almost all uphill, and was a little disheartening to see the fog settle start to down over the monument again when I was just five minutes away from it. Nonetheless, when I got there, the fog was several orders of magnitude thinner than it had been in the morning, so I felt the effort was definitely worth it. The rain started falling again almost as soon as I began my descent, and by the time I returned to the hotel it was quite a steady downpour.
Surprisingly, however, the air was fairly clear, and I was able to get some good views of Magadan city, including the section of Lenin Prospekt that climbs the hill to the TV tower in the middle of the city. This is significant because it marks one end of the Road of Bones (or the Kolyma Highway to give it its official title), the longest road in the road (the other end of the road being in Yakutsk).
As you might imagine, I was delighted to be able to sit down and rest after the combination of two hours standing in the museum followed by a two hour brisk walk up a hill and back again.
As a result of the walk, I didn’t get any dinner, but I didn’t mind. I had enjoyed a good lunch, and I’m sure I’ll remember my walk and getting a good look at the Mask of Sorrows long after dinner would have been forgotten.
Day 3 - Magadan
Thursday
3 July 2014
