Yesterday I flew over Kamchatka’s volcanoes, without ever having flown onto them – as I had hoped to do, planned to do, and bragged that I would do.

It is tempting to get angry with myself for this. In the clarity of retrospection, it is easy to criticize myself for not doing the research to find ways to contact the tour companies, to find out first hand that not a one of them will put on a trip in mid-February. Dasha even warned me, back in Dalian.

Going to Kamchatka was a long journey, and the trip an expensive one, even without paying for hotels or the costs of a day of heliboarding. Food and drink were pricey (except for the sweet nectar of locally brewed beer, bottled on demand, and all the fish jumpingout of the water).

Getting my board retuned after my run-in with volcanic shrapnel was not cheap (although Maxim at the Kuba boardshop is a right P-tex magician and deserved every ruble fair enough).

Flying there and back was more than US$600 on Siberian air’s “Polly class” (an unfortunate name for their economy rates, but I guess they didn’t read the US papers back then).

And I never went heliboarding.

Yet I’m not angry with myself, nor at all regretful that I went. Regretful, yes, that I did not better anticipate the difficulty of just showing up and hoping to arrange everything ad hoc. But if it was known for sure that we’d need to go in mid-March at the earliest, I know Harold would not have been able to join me, and I’m not so sure I would have bothered myself. March would be fitting far less well into my plans of going home for winter and then back to China, via Korea, before too long. It is all for the best, then, that I was lured by heliboarding. For, otherwise, I very likely would have passed up an oppurtunity to visit such a distant and unique place. I’ve never been anywhere that I did not notice one single foreigner (Harold and Ukranians not withstanding). I would never have met what has been the most generous and welcoming local population of any place I’ve ever traveled, defeating Mexico and even Brazil, I feel it fair to say.

Maybe I will never manage to helicopter onto one of its volcanoes, but I’ve now discovered one of a very few rare places that are stupidly far from home but to which I’m certain I will someday return.

* * *

The roads of Kamchatka are only paved in and near the capital, Petropavlosk-Kamchatsky, and this time of year, paved or unpaved, all covered in snow and ice. The locals don’t seem to mind, driving their Japanese, right-hand drive cars as if snow was rubber and ice glue. Only the government, out of stubborn patriotism, drives Russian-made vehicles. For everyone else it’s worth it to pay the up-to $5000 extra in import duties and shipping costs to buy Japanese cars. Many of these are so small I would have previously thought them entirely unsuited for the snow, yet they defy at every turn everything I thought I knew about the laws of physics and the force of friction. (”vectors! break for the vectors! I duwanna die!”) The public buses are all Korean; Russia drives on the right side of the road (when it bothers to pick a side at all) and it wouldn’t do to have people walking into the middle of the icy street to board Japanese ones. Unlike colorful Central American reincarnations of American school buses no one other than the weather bothers to repaint Kamchatka’s second-hand Korean buses. Destinations never to be reached again are still written on the sides, secret to all but me. Ads for Busan beauty academies and faded instructions on how to use those newfangled RFID transit cards gave me something better to look at than fogged up windows and darkly-dressed, unsmiling Russian commuters, while I clutched my snowboard and felt out-of-place.

It was only four snow-cavelike bus stops to Krasnaya Sopka, the Red Hill, from Julia’s apartment. There are no chair lifts in Kamchatka, but around Petropavlosk are several decent hills with old, slow, Czechoslovakian-made rope tows. You can’t buy day passes, instead it’s $1.65 per ticket and it’s one ticket, one ride. Our first day at Krasnaya the manager, once he came back from lunch, turned on the lift just for me, Harold, and one middle-aged woman from Moscow.

At Moraznaya, the biggest ski hill, outside of the town of Yelizovo, about 40km from Petropavlosk, some enterprising lifties had forgotten to tear some of the collected tickets, and through a friend, were so kind as to give us 25% off. Just my little contribution to rewarding Russian entrepreneurialism and, in reducing the need to print new tickets, saving Kamchatka’s fragile environment. Moraznaya was bigger but icy, and Krasnaya was small but had good snow. I didn’t try any of the other ski hills, but despite their modest size and thigh-jarring Czechoslovakian rope tows, still good fun and not worth the long trip at all.

The people and the uniqueness are worth the trip, and along with those elusive powder bowl volcano peaks, certainly worth another …but maybe at the right time of year next time.