MIR Corporation's Travel Log:
Russia's Southern Urals & Lower Volga
Follow along with Bill Altaffer and a group of travelers through the Urals and Lower Volga and into some of the lesser-known towns along the way.
Bill Altaffer, 64-year-old ski instructor, photographer and travel company owner from Mammoth, California, was declared the "World's Most Traveled Man" in 2005. This year he is in third place and running as fast as he can to catch up. Of the 757 countries, territories, autonomous regions, enclaves, geographically separated island groups, and major states and provinces counted by the MostTraveledPeople.com, Bill has been to 676 of them, with 81 to go. His favorites places are the obscure Russian oblasts that he writes about in this blog.
Days 3-5: Pokrovskoye, Kurgan, Chelyabinsk
September 23-25, 2008 The next morning, we drove to the tiny village of Pokrovskoye to visit the Rasputin Museum. Rasputin's home was torn down long ago, but the museum, in an old log cabin, recreates it and contains many of the Mad Monk's personal belongings. Other items of interest were a book on Rasputin edited by Saddam Hussein and numerous commercial items, from soap to beer, branded with the Rasputin name. A Rasputin look-alike made an appearance, posing for photos with the men of our group as they sat in Rasputin's "Viagra chair."
After, we continued our drive to Kurgan, notable because it is not mentioned in the Lonely Planet guide book. It is one of the oldest settlements in Siberia, founded in 1553, and has a pre-Scythian history. It is a stop on the Trans-Siberian Railway and had been a key city in the Soviet scientific and industrial communities. As was the case everywhere except Moscow, the only English TV channel available in our hotel was BBC News. The next morning, we took a city tour which included a very nice, informative museum, concluding our visit with lunch.
During the afternoon, we drove through the countryside to our next stop, Chelyabinsk, a large industrial city on the eastern slope of the Ural Mountains. Since it had begun as a stop on the Silk Road, its symbol is the camel. It was the home of the Soviet Katyusha rockets and T-34 tanks during WWII, earning it the nickname "Tankograd." As in all the cities we visited, traffic was extremely heavy, the current affluence of the society reflected in the numbers of new, luxury cars packing the streets, including Hummer stretch limos. This city, as most we visited, boasted international ethnic restaurants and modern malls with up-scale shopping. Prices seemed to be comparable to what we would pay at home.
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