Times Educational Supplement Articles

Starting on Friday 11July, Simon Chapman wrote 8 weekly articles covering the expedition's progress from preparation to fulfilment. The articles were emailed to the TES using the satellite phone. Each piece was illustrated with sketches from Simon's diary of the trip.

Despatch No 4..... Trout Soup on the Kema River.

This afternoon I nearly lost my passport in the river, pranged the canoe and went for a ’long swim’ down a rapid. I also had a lot of trout soup (mainly cold and unappetising) to eat. All of this, just on our first day on the river.

Before starting our main expedition down the Armu, our guide, Sergei said we should test the canoe out on nearby river called the Kema. The Kema is popular with holidaymakers from Vladivostok who set up camps on the banks and spend their time fishing, eating the fish they catch and steaming themselves in home made tent-saunas that they set up on the riverside shingle. Their hospitality is overwhelming and before we had even started canoeing we had been force fed masses of trout soup and offered a good steaming and whipping down with birch branches.

Finally we built the canoe up and set off. Dippers and grey wagtails flitted between the boulders sticking out of the water and twice we saw ospreys swooping for fish. Negotiating the minor rapids added to the thrill of being on a wilderness river. These soon began to increase in frequency and ferocity. Dave got out of the canoe (he said to do some videoing but maybe it was because of the mounting tension over my and Sergei’s canoeing styles). He would walk back to the road and get a lift down to our planned camping spot.

Five hours later, tired and not as sharp as we should be on the rough water we came to a zig-zag as the river cut around some house-sized boulders. On the first turn the canoe shipped water and, lunging through the exit ‘waterchute’, the front end snagged a large rock mid-stream suddenly pitching us side-on to the flow. I jumped onto the rock to stop us capsizing. Sergei nearly fell out as he too clambered up. The canoe was filling up at one end and the dry-bag containing my passport was in danger of floating off. I edged along the boulder and succeeded in swinging the bag to safety but in doing so fell in and was swept along some distance before I managed to get to the shore. I tried to swim back across to Sergei and the canoe. The flow took me again but I got a finger hold and pulled myself up onto the boulder. Somehow, we emptied the half-sunken boat and carried on.

The rapids after that were either easier or we were more skilful at negotiating them. By then I was too cold to care in any case. At least Dave and Anatoli, our driver, had hot food prepared when we arrived at the camp they had made. It was trout soup.

Despatch No 5......The Modern Dersu

The modern Dersu brings pot noodles into the forest. And, at the end of a long day canoeing on the river, it’s good to be given instant hot food.

Our driver, Anatoli, is the nearest we have come to a real Dersu Uzala. True, he’s a Russian, not indigenous Siberian like the original, but he is a man of the Taiga. Every winter he sets off into the forest for two months with his rifle and skis and he hunts. The album of black and white photos he brought out at his wooden house in the forest at the edge of Terney showed him with dark-furred sables lined up on the snow, Gorbusha salmon and stags he had shot. Anatoli has seen wild tigers on seven occasions. As we sat around our campfire a few night ago, he promised to tell me the story of ‘his’ tigers; half a mug full of Vodka for each one.

Anatoli is softly spoken. Next to Sergei our large, ebullient guide he seems almost introverted at times. When he speaks of tigers, he becomes animated. He acts out the encounters, the flickering firelight accentuating his expressions and giving extra life to his actions.

On his first encounter, he had been carrying a heavy load though the snow to a logging camp. His pack was so cumbersome that he could not look up nor reach his rifle. He came across a recently killed stag and was eyeing up the antlers as a trophy when he noticed a tiger cub a couple of metres to one side of him. Then he saw two more. Their mother was behind the stag. She got up and growled. Anatoli fumbled for his rifle without success. The tiger approached. Anatoli felt there was only one option- to roll over, drop the pack and grab the gun- though he knew sudden movement could provoke an attack. His plan worked. He loosed off two warning shots and the tigers fled.

Anatoli’s second tiger was close to his house at the edge of Terney. One morning he found tracks in his garden. All the same he set off into the forest to fetch meat from a red deer he had shot the previous day. As he was cutting the carcass a tiger jumped out from behind a fallen tree.
“My air stuck up on end”, he smiled. “And look! It’s been grey like this ever since”.

Our own count of animals encountered on our Siberian forest odyssey is not as impressive as Anatoli’s; only three chipmunks, one hare and a glimpse of something sinuous, dark and furry that may well have been a sable. No tigers as yet, and nor is an encounter likely. I’ll have to stick to Anatoli’s anecdotes. Evidently I have a lower alcohol tolerance than him. I still have five stories to go.

Despatch 6------Tiger Tracks

The tracks were the size of my hand; four toed, no claw marks, unmistakably tiger. There were 14 of them dented into the reddish earth at the edge of a clear felled area. The prints led downhill between some straggly bushes and petered out, or were smothered over, by the tread marks of large tractor tyres. At one point you could see where the tiger had skidded on the slope; four gouges in the mud ending in deep round holes where the toes had sunk in. The ground was hard now and bore the marks of a spattering of raindrops. The tiger had been here several days ago reckoned the hunter/fisherman who showed us the footprints.
"It's a large male-maybe two and a half metres long who is here in the summer but travels to the coast every winter".
No he hadn't seen it.

With the threat of a tiger or more likely a bear, encounter, you would think we would be taking no chances. But we are armed with two axes between four of us (used for cutting firewood) and right now as I write this Dave is stretched out sunbathing on the riverside shingle. (It's breezy by the rapid so there are no midges-which makes a change). Even Sergei, our guide, seems far more relaxed with my daily wanderings into the forest on the grounds that with one tiger covering a territory of 160 square kilometres, there is little likelihood of actually coming across one (unfortunately-but keep trying).

So here we are; a rest day; a good day for the sun to shine at last. Tonight we'll set-up the sat phone and laptop and once again video conference with children on summer school in Knowsley. While I'll be looking at them in the laptop's screen and answering their questions about the expedition, there really could be a tiger right there in the bushes behind me.

Despatch 7------Lost

Today we gave ourselves a serious scare. Our plan was to climb the pyramidal peak behind our camp, an apparently straightforward trek; diagonal up to the edge of the ridge then follow the deer track we were sure to find there to the top. Simple. So simple, in fact, that we took no map (it was too large scale in any case), no axe to mark a trail and no GPS.

We satisfied our British need to reach the summit in about two hours. We were in thick forest the whole way. There was no view. Coming down should’ve been a case of retracing our route. Unfortunately the terrain got in the way.

Under the cover of the trees the ridge, which had appeared so triangular, in reality comprised numerous sub-ridges. We followed the wrong one. We found out when we came to a landslide with a view out that bore no relationship to the topography of the area as we remembered it.

This was when some degree of panic set in. We are in Siberia, not the Lake District. There are tigers here- and bears; we have found plenty of their tracks (and dung) on the way up. There are forested mountains in all directions, which all look the same or at least are nothing like those we climbed up.
There are two possibilities:
1. Head downhill to the valley we can see, find a stream and follow it- hopefully to our river, the Armu (But what if we have inadvertently crossed the watershed?).
2. Cross the ridge and find a view in the opposite direction. Maybe this will make us feel better.
Option 2 struck us as the better idea so we duly clambered back up and around.
We took stock of our equipment and provisions; 1½ bars of chocolate, 1 litre of water, 1 Swiss army knife, 1 cigarette lighter, 2 compasses; between three of us. We also had a nearly full bottle of insect repellent. There were eight hours of daylight left. We started to consider the possibility of a night out in the forest.

The view from the other side of the ridge was more encouraging; there was a large river, which had to be the Armu. But it had an island. We had passed no island in the canoe the previous day, so this must be downstream of our camp.

We started the steep descent, deviating northwards so that we would arrive further upstream. Two hours later, we reached a river. It was not the Armu. It was far too small. There was only one logical option now; follow it downstream. Hopefully it would be an Armu tributary. We would arrive somewhere far downstream of our camp then start the laborious trek up the river’s edge. We sloshed through the shallows, moving purposefully, not talking now. I think we were all quite worried.
Some time later we found footprints, then a cigarette packet (not too badly rotted), and finally a towel- my towel which I had left to dry on a rock when we set off!. Somehow, against our most hopeful estimations of our location, in six hours on the mountain we had achieved that most British tradition; a circular walk.