As we get closer to our departure date for the Kuril Islands, it occurs to me that many of you are wondering how we physically get from here to there. This will be my 4th trip to Russia (I've already conducted 2 field seasons, plus a trip last December to retrieve our samples from the museum in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, which I'll abbreviate as Y-S from here on out), so I feel like I've got a pretty good handle on what to expect.
The first step is to get all of our Russian visa paperwork lined up. We travel on tourist visas, but must first be "invited" by a host institution (the Y-S Regional Museum) to come for a visit. Once we have our invitations in hand, we send our passports to the nearest Russian Consulate (Seattle, in this case), and they print up our special travel visas and glue them into our passports (see photo).
Scanned image of Dr. Etnier’s 2006 Russian tourist visa.
One of the things about traveling to Russia that is most daunting to non-Russian-speaking travelers is that the Cyrillic alphabet can be a bit confusing and, well, foreign if you can't read it. But it isn't totally unmanageable. For instance, my name: Michael Etnier, (last name pronounced [et'-ny-er] with the stress on the 1st syllable) looks approximately like this in Cyrillic: МАЙКЛ ЗТНЕР.
Once we have our Russian visas, we can hop on a plane headed west (we actually fly a "great circle route" over Kodiak Is. and the Aleutian Islands). We fly from Seattle direct (11 hours) to Seoul, South Korea, where we can catch the daily flight to Y-S (3 hours). But here's the catch: we arrive too late to make the connection, and have to wait about 12 hours in Seoul (we'll get hotel rooms). So we'll all check our baggage and field gear all the way through to Y-S and only have a carry-on bag with us in Seoul.
We won't quite have enough time to sight-see in Seoul on this leg of the trip-we'll save that for the return leg, when we miss the connection by about an hour (which means we have a 23 hour lay-over rather than a 12 hour lay-over).
In my 3 previous trips to Russia, I've been in Seoul 6 times, and have found downtown to be remarkably accessible to western travelers. My favorite thing is to wander around the market districts, which can be vaguely reminiscent of Diagon Alley (from the Harry Potter books/movies). There are miles and miles of vendors' stalls, where they sell everything you could imagine plus a huge array of things that you probably can't! Giant piles of flip flops. Racks and racks of cheap clothing. Bags and bags of dried fish and fish products. Piles and piles of red peppers (whole, ground, pastes--for making kim-chee (see photo)).
Piles of whole, crushed, and ground red peppers in the Seoul Market. This was just one of dozens of similar pepper vendors in the market.
They even sell chicken feet and boiled pigs heads (really! I've seen them!)
And although you might think that a Caucasian Anglo-American (of which I am one) might be more conspicuously different in South Korea than in Russia, it's really not the case. Seoul has huge numbers of expatriates and business people from all over the world visiting. In fact, nearly all of the signage in downtown Seoul is printed bilingually---in Korean and in English! So while a white guy walking in the market is certainly noticed as a foreigner, it's not all that unusual. In contrast, in Y-S, which is predominantly (though certainly not entirely) Caucasian, we can be spotted as Americans from miles away---our clothes, our demeanor, our backpacks. Even our facial expressions identify us as foreigners in Y-S. And except for a few people in Y-S on oil business, Y-S really isn't visited by Americans very often.
So that's basically how we get to Russia-somewhat of an adventure in and of itself (despite all the times we have to just sit and wait). Once we get there, we'll have a little bit of preparation of field gear. But the main thing we have to do is wait for our Russian Arrival paperwork to clear (so that they officially know we're there). That can take up to 5 more days of waiting.
I'll make another entry next week after we have a group meeting with all the latest updates!
---Dr. E