This is Russia

Be kind to your goat

Thirty years ago, I went to Siberia. I had applied to go on expedition with Operation Raleigh, an organisation with military links that sold itself as a way for young people to do good in interesting places. I’d applied to go to Mongolia, but the previous expedition had come to difficulty, so my expedition — 93D — was shimmied over the border into Siberia and Buryatia, the ethnic Mongolian republic in Siberia. The pull was Siberia of course, but also Lake Baikal, the largest freshwater lake in the world, a lake with water so pure (in 1993) that you could pollute it by dipping a test-tube into it.

To qualify to visit the purest lake in the world, I had to swim across a tarn on Ilkley Moor in the dead of night. Seems fair. I also had to raise £3000 which I could not have done without the organising help and contacts of my parents. We did auctions, hosted a choir evening, did all sorts. And I got to Siberia where I spent an astonishing three months during its short but intense summer.

93D consisted of majority British volunteers, but also a couple of dozen “international volunteers,” from Singapore and elsewhere, and, once we got to Russia, a couple of dozen local Siberians. Here we are, young and keen in Moscow:

We got to Irkutsk on the Trans-Siberian, but please immediately banish any Orient Express images. This was the milk train. It stopped at every station, and although some of our volunteers were put in first class, most of us were in fourth. There were vinyl benches to sleep on, cockroaches to avoid, and so many bloody pine and birch trees to look at out of the window. Thousands and thousands of miles of them. The train journey got more exciting when we realised that the women who operated the samovars (hot water boilers) between the carriages also sold vodka. This vodka became useful when we also discovered that the next few carriages contained Russian conscripts who were happy to sell their kit for cash. I still have a Russian army belt somewhere.

On one platform, I saw convicts in striped uniforms being led across the tracks.

I drank too much vodka.

I got to Irkutsk in one piece but I really wanted a bath.

Here we are before the train. I’m looking grumpy on the front row.

The expedition consisted of each of us doing three '“phases.” Mine were:

1. to survey the landscape for nuclear radiation, as a bomb had apparently been exploded underground in Soviet times and no-one had been told until recently.

2. to dig for ancient frogs.

3. to do something exciting like raft down the Selenga River or trek through the Sayan mountains.

The survey was OK. We worked for a man named Victor, a scientist from the Siberian Academy of Sciences, who looked like he belonged in the forest: he was huge with white hair and a big white beard. He instructed us to gather a lot of leaves and muddy water. But this was 1993, when Russia had just emerged from the Soviet Union, and things were chaotic. It’s amazing the expedition went ahead.

Funding was suddenly pulled for the radiation survey after the first week and we had nothing to do. For a few days, we helped out at a local clinic, measuring children. From that I mostly remember the dirt streets, the unmistakable smell of Russian cigarettes which I can still recognise, and men lying in the streets comatose drunk at 8 in the morning. After that, we helped a local farmer build a banya (sauna) instead, and I learned to chop trees and build. From that, I remember hiding behind the woodpile when the farmer came bearing fresh liver from a sheep he had just grabbed from a passing herd and slit open. At the celebratory dinner, a sheep’s head filled with intestines was passed around the table towards me and I did not have the confidence to say no way in hell would I be eating that, but I was saved by the farmer getting a very useful (to me) phone call. I haven’t touched vodka since. Or sheep’s intestines.

For the frogs, we spent weeks with the wonderful paleontologist Margarita Erbayeva from the Siberian Academy of Sciences. I’d like to say I remember all the magnificent science we did but mostly I remember the evening that Jane revealed that she could make chapatis with our British Army rations (tinned beefburgers featured a lot), and when Margarita invited us to her flat in Ulan Ude and served us bread and delicious jam. Everything is delicious after six weeks of army rations in a country with — at that time — very few fresh vegetables to buy.

My treat for completing both those phases was an adventure phase. I was chosen to trek the Sayan mountains. I don’t know how they are now, but in 1993 there was nothing to be seen but nature. No pylons, no sign of human activity except now and then a wooden banya in the deep forest. They were extraordinarily, sumptuously beautiful. I got trench foot and was told I might have to drop out. So my friends made me stop every hour and they dried and tended to my feet for me, and I will always think that one of the kindest things anyone has ever done for me. We camped on a high plateau and in the morning had wild mountain rhubarb with our army porridge. I was whipped with birch branches by two large Buryatian men in black underpants at a banya near a rushing icy river that we then had to jump into. (Do not be alarmed: getting whipped is what you do.)

I made friends who are still friends, British and Russian. This is not some soppy post to say please remember Russians are people too. I just wanted to remember my time in Russia because it was an exceptional thing to be part of. It was also frustrating to the point that we had a phrase, TIR, for whenever anything went wrong, usually inexplicably. TIR. This is Russia.

I’ve been back to Russia since but only to Moscow and nearby. I reported on a Pop Idol contest for serving prisoners, for the Independent on Sunday. Another weird hoot. I attended the World Toilet Organization summit, held near the Kremlin in a building that also housed a fur exhibit. Here is something about my trip to Star City — Russian NASA — when I was there, which includes one of my favourite jokes which actually isn’t a joke.

At Star City, Russia’s equivalent of NASA, a guide called Alexandr tells me that on space walks, cosmonauts wear diapers, yet another example of the superior practicality of Russians in space flight. (This reputation was secured for me by the story—confirmed by Young—that an American company once spent millions on developing a pen that could write upside down in space, while the Russians took pencils.) I tell Young I’ve heard Russian toilets in space are better and she believes it. “They build things that are simple and hard-wearing.” The Russian International Space Station toilet is also superior, according to astronaut anecdote, though the specialized training required to use toilets in space—a procedure that requires getting a grip on both the receptacle and the sucking, vacuuming devices that come with it—prevented the Americans from using it.

What did I learn from three months in Siberia?

• I don’t need a bed to sleep well (we camped for 90% of our time).

• I prefer a toilet to a hole in the forest with a home-made sign placed 20 metres away saying svobodna (free) or not. (And I didn’t have to look up svobodna to write that. I can still see the sign.)

• My decision to pack a pair of dungarees was inspired, because everybody envied them.

• I never want to eat a British Army beefburger again.

• I will never forget Tony telling me that to brew the quickest pot of tea, you need silver birch bark. And there is a lot of silver birch in Russia.

• Russia is a beautiful country, although now Lake Baikal is polluted by agricultural run-off, and its native omul fish is highly endangered.

• I will always feel affection for Siberia and the people I met there.

• You can get a fabulous suntan in Siberia.

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Animal hero of the week: Mandy the goat

The first goat! I try to vary these animal tales, but dogs and rats and pigeons are so bloody clever and inexplicably kind to humans, they dominate. But let’s talk about the goat.

This is farmer Noel Osborne, of somewhere in Australia. He’s probably dead now, as he was 78 in 2002, which is roundabout when this story happened.

Farmer Osborne was tending to his cattle when one of them knocked him into a big pile of manure. (My ears prick up at this because I have become a person who routinely comments to her partner when we are driving in the countryside, “ooh that is nice manure”.)

Farmer Osborne’s hip was broken, and he had no phone or means of contacting anyone. He had to lie in that manure pile for five days and nights, exposed to the Australian weather. But Mandy, his nanny goat, came to his rescue, huddling with him at night to keep him warm, and — when Osborne somehow found a container — letting him milk her for sustenance. Mandy his collie (Farmer Osborne didn’t have a great imagination for naming animals) also comforted him. Eventually some people arrived to collect a kid goat and found the farmer in his manure pile, his faithful animals beside him. Farmer Osborne survived, swore that goat’s milk was the elixir of life, and the moral of this story is: be kind to your goat.

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