Asiatified

Round the world way. See ther is Baikal!





Another nice mentioning about lake Baikal on this blog. Very stylish stuff.
The Transcontinental Oldbones Project

Back in the USSR........

It's Tuesday afternoon and I'm sitting in an internet cafe in Irkutsk, Siberia.

Another story by another wanderer...
Actually, a good example of a good travel experience! :)))

Gerbi Tsesarskaia

The interaction of Nature and the creative human spirit is the greatest source of inspiration in my work. Composite memories of pine- and cedar-covered hills surrounding the Baikal lake in Siberia, of the stillness of Armenian mountains, of the watery grays, pale blues and pinks of St. Petersburg's magnificent buildings, of the curves of its countless rivers, canals and bridges--all of these find reflection in the forms and colors of my work.

Find out more at Miami Photo

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Technorati

I've just signed up to Technorati. This is a verification post so don't pay much attention to it.
I just want to say, that http://technorati.com looks like a pretty good blog search engine.
Here is my profile: Technorati Profile

Lake Baikal. Island Olkhon. Nikita Bencharov's homestead

There are many different homesteads, hotels and camping areas. But there is one at the lake Baikal on Olkhon Island hosted by Bencharov family, which could be called at least unique. This place is located in a very beautiful place. They know how to do many things which bring great value to the homestead. They involve many different people, cultures, groups and individuals in making their homestead a living thing. Everytime you visit you will see changes and new perspectives.

Nikita Bencharov is a well known name. I wish there be more people like him.
Learn more about Nikita’s homestead.

Russia wins Eurovision!

Check it out here: http://www.eurovision.tv/

Dima Bilan's win for Russia means that next year's contest will be hosted in Moscow.

Image: Dima Bilan performing at the Starii Russkii Novii God Festival in London, 2008

Baikal.doc

From 30.06 to 5.07 Baikal.doc documentary movie festival will be held in Ulan-Ude, Buryatiya.

http://www.baikal-doc.ru/ They have eglish version of the website.

There I learned some news about cinema in Buryatiya.

Dad and Dave

Here is a blog by father and son about traveling through Russia from Vladivostok to Moscow. Pretty interesting with nice photos.

Euro News about Russia

The Champions League Football Final is being held in Moscow. Manchester United vs. Chelsea

Dima Bilan, Russia's entry in the Eurovision Song Contest, has advanced to the next round.

Updates to follow!

Artsiberia

From Artsiberia:

"The idea and the goal of the project is to promote Siberian art and to encourage knowledge about the cultural heritage of the Eastern Siberia through art exhibits and exchanges, and the publications of books and articles, cards and posters.

All requests related to cooperation, exhibits, lecture series, publications and art and citizen exchanges are welcomed."

You can find many images of siberian art, also religious buddist and orthodox art. Very interesting and 'real' subjects.

Baikal Butterflies

Here is a very interesting web site about Baikal Butterflies. Would be very interesting for people who study this subject or biology.

Here is the link: http://babochki.narod.ru/pi.html

It is both in eglish and russian :-| actually at the same time. :)

Totally must see. There are many photos of butterflies!

Baikalplan - shto eto?!

Here is a quote from http://www.baikalplan.de/

“It was in spring 1995 when the first curious clique visited the Arabika club in Irkutsk. Actually, the BUNDjugend Sachsen had looked for contacts with an ecological youth club, but what they found was a mixture of cavers, conservationists, and a social youth club on the lakefront of one of the most beautiful lakes of the world. A disused water tower on the verge of a development area serves as their domicile, their activities range from youth camps on the lakefront of Lake Baikal to great expeditions into the longest or deepest cave of the world, their leader is a geologist, archaeologist, shaman, and social worker in one, their operating range is as big as Germany, always keeping in mind their expeditions to the Caucasus or Mongolia, to France and Alaska.

The language abilities were low on both sides, but nevertheless they got along with each other at first go, and ever since each year a German group has visited Siberia or members of the Russian club have come to Germany. Friendships were developed, joint projects were realised, and visions were devised. What was only a touristic exchange of sights at the beginning has become more over the years. An exchange of thoughts and experiences without thinking of all the cultural differences, a joint fascination for the natural spectacle called Lake Baikal, and the wish to keep it like that for the following generations.”

Very interesting vision. This is a very strong community on the web. Everyone should pay attention to it.

Environmental Memoirs

I found this interesting website which has information about Russia and lake Baikal.
Click here -- to go to this page. Also there is some info on Great Baikal Trail (GBT).

Holiday in Siberia Part 1 - Baikal

An article by Edward on Slow Travel

Historically an invitation to Siberia came from Josef Stalin. Unlike Butlin’s it was to a rather different sort of camp, a gulag, or labour camp. Trips also tended to be one-way affairs, with many prisoners literally worked to death. The size and remoteness of Siberia allowed this barbaric activity to go on out of sight if not out of mind of most Russians. If Siberia was an independent nation it would still be one of the biggest countries in the world, and anywhere this size has got to have something special offer. And indeed it does!

We’ve just spent the last few days around Lake Baikal, the biggest single repository of freshwater on the planet. It’s awesome in scale. You could lose Scotland in it. If it wasn’t so far away some people might be tempted to try. It’s also currently frozen, covered with an incredible icy surface that creates a tempting white plain (up to 80km across) between the rugged black mountains that flank the water on either side. The ice is deceptive however, especially at this time of the year. During the numb winter months people happily drive 20 ton trucks across the surface on established ice roads. Come the spring melt it’s a different story. The ice softens unevenly and whilst it is safe in some areas, in others it becomes treacherously thin and downright dangerous. This year 11 vehicles have been lost and 9 people drowned in the deep dark icy waters when the apparently reliable ice has suddenly given way beneath them.

It was with this grisly fate in mind that we were somewhat thankful that the timing of our arrival on Olkhon Island (the biggest in the Lake) coincided with the deployment of a natty little ‘Padoushka’ or hovercraft. This enabled us to skim thrillingly over the ice safe in the knowledge that if it cracked we weren’t going through and into the depths below. And what depths. Baikal is 1637m deep at it’s most abyssal point, and as a result the water remains startlingly, scrotum-shrinkingly cold even in midsummer. It’s also terrifyingly clear with visibility up to 40m down resulting in some swimmers suffering from vertigo – not something you expect whilst taking a dip (but at least it might take your mind off your freezing testicles).

We are almost the first tourists of the season on the island too, only being beaten to this honour by a (very nice) German couple who arrived the day before. Typical. We later met them naked in the banya, so made friends perhaps more quickly and intimately than we might have anticipated. Yesterday however we were literally the only guests at the homestead and as such have been treated like slightly weird, if welcome, oddities. Last night we even had a personal concert on accordion and guitar (not simultaneously I hasten to add) by Nikola the care-taker (‘Because I take care of things’). It’s like being part of a small family and a world away from the summer hordes when the dining room has fed up to 350 people in a day in high season.

Far from the madding crowd. On an island. In the middle of a frozen lake. In Siberia. Bliss.

Peter Thomson

Peter Thomson is an independent writer, editor and radio producer. He’s the author of the acclaimed 2007 book Sacred Sea: A Journey to Lake Baikal (Oxford University Press), which The New York Times called “superb” and “compelling,” and founding editor and producer of the groundbreaking NPR environmental news program Living on Earth.

New York Times Article on Baikal Warming

An article from NY Times

For direct link: click here.

Family Science Project Yields Surprising Data About a Siberian Lake

In 1945, when Stalin ruled the Soviet Union, Mikhail M. Kozhov began keeping track of what was happening under the surface of Lake Baikal, the ancient Siberian lake that is the deepest and largest body of fresh water on earth.

Every week to 10 days, by boat in summer and over the ice in winter, he crossed the lake to a spot about a mile and a half from Bolshie Koty, a small village in the piney woods on Baikal’s northwest shore. There, Dr. Kozhov, a professor at Irkutsk State University, would record water temperature and clarity and track the plant and animal plankton species as deep as 2,400 feet.

Soon his daughter Olga M. Kozhova began assisting him and, eventually her daughter, Lyubov Izmesteva, joined the project. They kept at it over the years, producing an extraordinary record of the lake and its health.

Now Dr. Izmesteva and scientists in the United States have analyzed the data and concluded, to their surprise, that the water in Lake Baikal is rapidly warming. As a result, its highly unusual food web is reorganizing, as warmer water species of plankton become more prevalent. These shifts at the bottom of the food web could have important implications for all of the creatures that live in the lake, they say.

Although Dr. Kozhov is famous among scientists who study lakes — his 1961 book “Lake Baikal and Its Life” is considered a classic — the new report is “the international debut of the Kozhov family’s legacy of research,” Stephanie E. Hampton of the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis at the University of California, Santa Barbara, said in an e-mail message.

She led the work along with Dr. Izmesteva who, like her mother and grandfather before her, is a professor at the university and a researcher at the biological field station it established in Bolshie Koty in 1918. Their findings are being reported this month in the journal Global Change Biology.

Like others who have seen the data, Dr. Hampton said in an interview that she was in awe of the people who had collected it. “Even in the spring, summer and fall, this is tough,” she said. “In the winter to go out a mile and a half on the ice and break through it to take water samples, in a year-round effort for 60 years, is pretty amazing to me. Every time I think about it I am humbled.”

Marianne V. Moore, an ecologist at Wellesley College and another researcher on the project, said she learned about the data in 2001 when she took students in her class, “Baikal and the Soul of Siberia,” to the lake. Dr. Izmesteva spoke to the group and showed a few slides, which the translator said had been drawn from a 60-year record. “I thought he had made a mistake,” Dr. Moore recalled. “So I basically ignored it.”

When she returned with another class two years later and another scientist mentioned the data, “my jaw dropped to the floor,” she said. “I realized this is just extraordinary.”

She got in touch with Dr. Hamilton, who is an expert in the analysis of complex ecological field data, particularly the use of statistical techniques to discern real trends in the messy ups and downs of nature. The center in Santa Barbara financed the collaboration.

Baikal is a place of unusual biodiversity, with many species found nowhere else. Among them are giant shrimp, bright green sponges that grow in shallow water forests and the Baikal seal, the world’s only exclusively freshwater seal. In 1996, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, or Unesco, designated the lake a World Heritage Site.

Although it is known that warming is more intense at high latitudes, as in the Baikal area, and that water is warming in other major lakes, including Lake Tahoe in Nevada and Lake Tanganyika in central Africa, many scientists had thought that Lake Baikal’s enormous volume and unusual water circulation patterns would buffer the effects of global warming.

Instead, the researchers report, surface waters in Lake Baikal are warming quickly, on average by about 0.4 degrees Fahrenheit every decade. At a depth of about 75 feet, the increase is about 0.2 degrees per decade, they say, enough to jeopardize species “unable to adapt evolutionarily or behaviorally.”

Over the last 137 years, the researchers say, the ice-free season has lengthened by more than two weeks, primarily because ice forms later in the year. The database, including data on chlorophyll that the family started collecting in 1979, suggest that the “growing season” for plankton and algae has lengthened in the lake. Chlorophyll levels have tripled since measurement began, the researchers said.

Ordinarily, the researchers said in their report, this increased plant growth would be accompanied by decreases in water clarity, but that is not what the data show at Lake Baikal. This finding, they said, “highlights the importance of establishing monitoring for ‘early warming’ before a need for monitoring may be perceived visually.”

Now, Dr. Hampton said, she and other researchers are examining how the Kozhov family’s data fit with records of ecological phenomena elsewhere. So far, she said, “the data correlate well.”

“You could not make up something like this.” she added.

Dr. Moore said Dr. Kozhov died in 1968 and his daughter Olga died in 2000. The family persisted in their work through years of political, economic and social turmoil, especially the collapse of the Soviet Union after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 when, Dr. Moore said, “funds for the program just dried up.”

Today, she said, Dr. Izmesteva and her colleagues pay for their work in part with fees they earn by consulting or doing environmental impact assessments.

“They sustain the program any way they can,” Dr. Moore said.

Missing Russian Food?

After being removed from Baikal and Russia for over half a year now, I began to get nostalgic for nice Russian food, so I began my quest for a Russian grocery in London and discovered the wonderful Kalinka at 35 Queensway in London (Queensway or Bayswater tube). While most of the products are technically imported from Poland or Germany, you can find all your favorite Russian foods here (or introduce yourself to the delights of simple, tasty Russian food). The store's location near Hyde Park also makes it a great place to go pick up a picnic on a nice spring day. For our picnic, we went for the ‘peasant lunch’ buying two types of sausage, farmer’s chees, black rye bread, eggplant caviar, Russian pickles, and some kvass (Russian soda made from fermented bread) and apricot juice to wash it all down, and then finished with some poppyseed cake and spice cakes (just like on Baikal!). Kalinka is also a great place to buy things like buckwheat flour for a good price, get a nice bottle of vodka, or explore the interesting world of Russian candy.

For more culinary adventures in London, please visit http://peoplewhoeat.wordpress.com/