From Houston to Sydney 2013

Russian Far East - 2014

The rain was still falling steadily when I woke this morning in Susuman.  Nonetheless, I managed to go for a half hour walk before we met to leave our hotel at 8:45am.  Our hotel did not have a restaurant, so we drove to the same small café in the main street where we had eaten dinner the previous evening.  It was a hearty breakfast, comprising a couple of fried eggs, a bowl of porridge with condensed milk for sweetener, and pancakes.

We had seen little of Susuman the previous day when we arrived, and while food was purchased from a minimarket for our time in the abandoned town of Kadykchan (our destination for the day), we took some time to wander the nearby streets.  There is little to see in Susuman, the main sight being the Young Engineer’s College that has the front half of an Ilyushin Il-18

airliner protruding from the external wall.  As we left Susuman, we did stop briefly at one other interesting sight, however, which was the former airport.  Susuman’s airport closed several years ago, and the terminal buildings have now been converted into a church.  In many parts of the world, church buildings are being taken over for other uses such as art galleries, restaurants, and so on, but in Susuman, the airport has been taken over by a church.

The drive to Kadykchan was a distance of about 100 kilometres, and the trip took a little over an hour and a half.  The deterioration in the quality of Kolyma Highway was quite marked, and the minibuses had to steer some awkward courses to avoid huge flooded potholes.  As the approached Kadykchan, there was a particularly bad section of flooded road with a soft mud base, and traversing this section was especially treacherous, so much so that our minibus suffered a flat tyre as a result.

We reached Kadykchan at about 1:00pm.  First impressions were, as expected, of a substantial town that had been completely abandoned and allowed to decay in a post-apocalyptic manner.  Kadykchan had been established in 1936 as a coal mining town populated by prisoners, but most of the current buildings date from the 1960s onwards when the town was re-settled by idealistic and enthusiastic Pioneers.  The mine closed in 1996 following a large explosion in the mine, and the town was officially shut down in 2003 when all services such as water and electricity were cut off.  A few settlers continued to occupy buildings illegally until they too left, the last settlers leaving in 2007.  At its height, the town had accommodated 10,000 residents.

We did our exploring in several time segments, meeting every few hours to exchange notes and make sure everyone was okay.  Our first session lasted until 3:00pm when we re-gathered for lunch.  We had free access to almost all the buildings in the town (the few that were inaccessible had access stairs removed).  Many of the buildings I walked through were apartments, usually with some household belongings still sitting inside, some others were specialist buildings, and these tended to be the most interesting.

I headed first to what must have been the symbolic town centre, where a bust of Lenin stood in front of the Club House.  When the last settlers abandoned Kadykchan, they shot the bust of Lenin’s head 15 times, so it is no longer in pristine condition (to say the least!).  The Club House was one of the least well preserved buildings in Kadykchan, perhaps because it was also one of the oldest.

The two most interesting buildings for me were the high school and the government administration building.  The high school still had books, posters, furniture and some fittings evident (somewhat like Pripyat, near Chernobyl, though not as intact as Pripyat), and also some wonderful wall murals.  The government building (appropriately located at 1 Lenin Street) also had some impressive murals as well as books and government papers just lying around on the floor.  There was even a pile of cheques in envelopes, addressed and ready for posting, but never sent.

The apartments were in various states of disrepair.  Most were completely empty with wallpaper falling off the walls, but a few still had items of furniture, children’s toys and personal effects.  Those apartments with balconies on upper floors offered some excellent views across the town in various directions.  Care had to be taken in walking around, as many interiors were dark and the ground everywhere was strewn with lumps of concrete, rubbish, burnt timber, metal objects and, in several cases, what looked like asbestos insulation.  At least I could be sure that the exposed electrical wires posed no danger of electrocution.

One area towards the north-west corner of the town comprised a medical compound.  There was a building housing gynecological services and blood transfusion services, a doctor’s surgery and a paediatric hospital.  Towards the southern end of the town, past a large ensemble of low, wooden buildings that seemed to the garages for the apartment dwellers, several factories were situated together with a tall observation tower, the purpose of which was unclear but it afforded excellent views across the entire town.

The coal mine was located a little apart from the town, off to the north-west and across a small river.  The concrete bridge linking the town to the mine had collapsed, but enough thin strips of concrete remained to enable foot passage across the raging stream.  I walked across to the mine, but there was little to see there apart from a few small structures and the completely abandoned and gutted administration building.

We were quite fortunate with the weather.  The day warmed up to 11 degrees Celsius, and although still grey and overcast, the rain held off throughout our entire visit to the town.  Indeed, by 8:30pm, the sky was brightening a little as the clouds seemed to be lifting somewhat, although by that time, the temperature was also falling quite markedly.

Our original intention was to camp overnight in Kadykchan, sleeping in sleeping bags in abandoned flats that still had some glass in the windows.  However, almost no windows still had glass in them, and the grime in the rooms made finding anywhere that looked remotely healthy elusive.  As a result, all except a handful of the people in the group agreed to sleep in a dormitory hotel in Myaundzha, a small town about five kilometres from Kadykchan back towards Susuman.

The rooms were very basic and lacked ensuite facilities and hot water, but the cost was just 650 roubles per person (about $20) and the rooms were clean (though spartan) and most importantly of all, warm, dry and mosquito-free.

Day 6 - Susuman to Kadykchan

Sunday

6 July 2014