Jim's Blog
Around the World for Russian Bears
I'm in Moscow waiting to catch an airplane to the east side of Russia. I'm going to have to go almost all the way around the world, right back to almost the West Coast of North America. It'll only be about four time zones different from where we are in British Columbia which means I could have gone straight across in about six hours, but as it is it's taking us four days to get to where we're going. This is the first leg. We've gone already to Frankfurt and then to Moscow, and then it's a 10-hour flight to Petropavlovsk, then we drive eight hours, then we take a helicopter way out to the coast.
I haven't blogged for a while because I've been catching up the last couple weeks since returning from Ethiopia. Now we're starting this next trip for Kamchatka brown bear on the Kamchatka Peninsula across from the end of the Aleutian Islands.
Looking forward to it. Should be an interesting trip.
The Next Day ...
We are way out in the middle of nowhere. We flew yesterday all night long from Moscow to Petropavlovsk across six time zones to the very east side of Russia on the Kamchatka Peninsula. As soon as we got there, we hopped on a bus all of us, and we've been driving for the last 10 or 11 hours north from there up the middle of the peninsula. Ten hours of continuous gravel roads and birch trees on the side of the road, snow everywhere and forever and forever and ever, oh my god. One little town along the way where we stopped to get something to eat.
Good bunch of guys. One of the guides and I have been arguing all the way about Brock Lesnar and a Russian ultimate fighter. He thinks the Russian guy is better, and I obviously know that Brock is the best. I also told him that I would have thought Russia would have had a hockey team with all of the ice and snow ... and then he started protesting and I asked him if they even had a team at the Olympics. We've been having fun on the bus. But absolutely dead tired because it's been five days we've been traveling. We're staying in a lodge ... cold, cold, cold, kind of bleak actually. A lot bleak actually. Tomorrow if the weather cooperates, we'll try to fly on the helicopters to our various camps and we're hoping that we'll be hunting bears soon.
5/4/2010
