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Usually strangers frolic in the world’s deepest lake in winter. But with many borders closed, Russians are flocking to make TikTok videos and take Instagram photos.
ON LAKE BAIKAL, RUSSIA – She’s been 2,000 miles so far: hanging up the sunroof of her white Lexus SUV that sparkled in the blinding sun, facing the smartphone selfie camera, loud bass, screaming tires, cutting donuts on blue-black, ice veined with white.
“It’s for Instagram and TikTok,” said Gulnara Mikhailova, who drove two days and two nights to Lake Baikal with four friends from the remote Siberian city of Yakutsk.
It was around zero degrees Fahrenheit when Ms. Mikhailova, who works in real estate, donned a swimsuit, climbed onto the roof of her car and, lying down, posed for photos.
It’s winter on the world’s deepest lake, 2021 Pandemic Edition.
Tourist guides call it the Russian season. Usually, it is foreigners – many from neighboring China – who flock to Lake Baikal in Siberia at this time of year to skate, cycle, hike, run, drive, hover and ski over an expanse of land. ice and snow, while the Russians escape the cold to Turkey or Thailand.
But Russia’s borders are still closed due to the pandemic, and to the surprise of locals, crowds of Russian tourists have swapped tropical beaches for the icicle-covered shores of the Baikal.
“This season is unlike any other – no one expected there to be such a crush, such a tourist boom,” said Yulia Mushinskaya, director of the People’s Island History Museum of Baikal in Olkhon.
People who work with tourists, she said, “are just in shock.”
If you catch a moment of stillness on the crescent-shaped lake, 400 km long and deep, the onslaught of the senses is from another world. You stand on three feet of ice so solid it is safely traversed by heavy trucks, but you feel fragile, fleeting, and small.
The silence around you is interrupted every few seconds by the crackle below – weird moans, bangs and twangs of techno-music. Look down and the imperfections of the clear ice emerge like pale, shimmering curtains.
Still, stillness is hard to find.
While Western governments have discouraged travel during the pandemic, in Russia, as is often the case, things are different. The Kremlin has turned coronavirus-related border closures into an opportunity to get Russians – who have spent the past 30 years exploring the world beyond the old Iron Curtain – addicted to home vacations.
A state-funded program launched last August offers refunds of $ 270 on domestic pleasure travel, including flights and hotel stays. It’s an example of how Russia, which had one of the highest coronavirus death rates in the world last year, has often prioritized economics over public health during the pandemic.
“Our people are used to traveling abroad to a large extent,” President Vladimir V. Putin said in December. “The development of domestic tourism is no less important.”
The last few months have seen a monumental crush of tourists on the beaches of the Black Sea and the ski resorts of the Caucasus. This winter, during what some call the “gender vacation” travel period around Defender of the Fatherland Day on February 23 (when Russia celebrates men) and March 8 (International Women’s Day), the Lake Baikal was the perfect place.
It is a distillation of tourism in the age of Instagram.
Some visitors bring their own smartphone tripods, repeatedly jumping up and down for a perfect shot of themselves in the air in front of a wall of ice. Others fly drones or set off brightly colored smoke bombs.
As the sun set recently, a line of tourists lay face down on the frozen lake inside a natural cave in the shore cliffs, snapping photos of the pink-tinted icicles hanging from the ceiling.
“Exit!” some shouted when another group arrived. “Take a hike, all of you! You block the sun!
“Social media drove all of this,” cave guide Elvira Dorzhiyeva said. “There are these top spots, and it’s like – ‘All I care about is I want what I’ve seen online.'”
The most requested photos are for clear ice, so some guides carry brushes to sweep the snow.
Nikita Bencharov, who learned English by participating in international table tennis tournaments in Soviet times, runs a large hotel complex on Olkhon and estimates that in a normal year more than 70% of winter visitors are foreigners .
This year pretty much all of her guests are Russians, which posed a bit of a problem. Russians who go on vacation abroad are used to cheap and comfortable accommodation, which is difficult to find in the far reaches of their own country. At Olkhon hotels this season, unpretentious double rooms cost up to $ 200 a night; in some cafes, the toilets are an unheated outhouse.
“Foreigners are already a little prepared and thank the Lord that there is at least a normal bed here and that they do not sleep on a bearskin,” Bencharov said. “They understand better than the Russians where they are going and why.”
Many operators geared towards foreign tourists have tried to adapt. On Olkhon, the once Chinese restaurant now serves borscht.
At the northern tip of the island, where orange cliffs tower over a blue-white labyrinth of ice formations, fleets of tourist vans drop off hundreds to slide and climb, then to sip on fish soup heated by fires directly on the ice.
A couple from Moscow, two engineers in their 30s, said they were visiting Siberia for the first time. One of them said he was delighted with the scenery but shocked at the poverty of the area and felt sorry for the people and the way they have to live.
About 80 km away, in a fishing camp across the lake, three men lying in a metal hut on the ice, the air inside tinged with the smell of dried fish, damp bedding and pine nut moonlight in a plastic bottle on the floor. Two of the men, the firefighters, said they make around $ 300 a month and take several weeks off in the fall to supplement their income by harvesting pine nuts from the forest.
“We do the minimum and we complain and we complain – and that’s it,” said one of the firefighters, Andrei, 39. “And, what, we are listening to Putin on TV …”
He let his voice fade away, with a nervous laugh. He declined to give his last name, worried about reprisals for his government post.
The alien landscape of Baikal offers an escape from difficulties and crises – temporary and perhaps deceptive. The coronavirus, for its part, appears to be non-existent, with no mask in sight on visitors packing vans and restaurants. Their contemptuous attitude mirrored an independent poll this month which found less than half of Russians feared catching the virus and only 30% were interested in Russia’s coronavirus vaccine.
“It’s psychosis,” ranger Elena Zelenkina said of global fear of the virus as she served tea and homemade donut holes in a gift shop next to hot springs on the shore is the calmest of the lake.
A group of music lovers from the nearby town of Irkutsk even held their annual indoor winter music festival. One of the spectators, Artyom Nazarov, was from Belarus – one of the few countries whose nationals can now easily enter Russia.
Belarus, like Russia, has been ravaged by anti-government protests. But like Mr. Putin, President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko of Belarus stood firm, deploying an overwhelming show of force to end the unrest. Mr Nazarov said he had supported the protesters, but as it seemed their victory was neither imminent nor assured, he was moving on.
He had spent an exhilarating week walking and skating around Olkhon. He looked forward to more outdoor tourism, on the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia or in Iceland if the borders opened.
“We all have our dreams and goals that we want to achieve,” Nazarov said. “Life goes on.”
Oleg Matsnev contributed to the Moscow research.
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