Walks in Altai.
At the beginning of this century, a real car started up in the family, and rather quickly they wanted to rush somewhere far away, explore something unknown, see the unknown, because it turned out that where the roads lead, there are already a dime a dozen such dreamers, and without the car will crawl along the road. Fortunately, just four hundred kilometers from our city, it begins - Gorny Altai.
I can sadly admit that, despite the proximity to Altai, in the last century I have been there only a few times: the first time with my dad at the age of eight, but in the south of Lake Teletskoye; once again - already at a “conscious age”, I managed to fuse the child to my mother and rush to raft on catamarans with my husband and company along the Biya from the same Teletskoye Lake. They were noble rafters, the category of this alloy was qualified as zero, “mattress” - good guys, but it seems to me that we can add it to the list of achievements, we overcame the rapids on Biya! Then difficult times came for everyone, and there was no time to crawl out.
It turned out that the road is not at all boring on your own typewriter (at one time, the journey from Biysk to Gorno-Altaisk seemed terribly boring to me by bus! ), And when closer to the border of the Altai Territory with the Republic of Altai, after the famous Splices, to the road a real rock comes out, you feel that everything, the joy of relaxation has begun!
The first trips were shallow - Chemal, the road to Kuyus, the Seminsky pass and up to the Chike-Taman pass. At that time, “motorization” was not yet rampant, the banks of the Katun were not so built up with bases that it was impossible to approach it, fat calm cows roamed along the banks and roads, basking on the beaches near the river. However, they remain calm and satisfied to this day, but then we understood why Altai cheese is so tasty.
Chemal made a particularly pleasant impression, the grass is all trimmed (by cows, of course), there is no fallen wood in the forest (locals are happy to sell armfuls of firewood) - a park, and nothing more! Another great fact is that there are never mosquitoes, just never!
I always liked how the Chemal River flows into the Katun.
And if you drive twenty kilometers beyond Chemal along the banks of the Katun, you can see what was left after the attempt to build the Katun hydroelectric power station, real passions boiled in our area more than thirty years ago, as a result, environmentalists won and it was not built.
An approximate travel plan looked like this: some point was planned, it is better that no one has been there yet and the road is not without problems, and that it is beautiful around; we arrive, put up tents and begin to relax, everyone to the best of their ability, someone roams around the neighborhood, climbs mountains, someone just rolls on the grass.
We went mainly in the summer, but once hit the road to celebrate the 8th of March on Lake Aya, or rather, next to it. The place is also remarkable because in Souzga you cross the bridge over the Katun - and you are on the territory of the Altai Territory, where there are no traffic cops anymore, one of our comrades simply demonstratively celebrated this moment, drinking a can of beer, while the rest of the cars made their way along the bridge.
Now the bridge is more solid.
Aya seems to be the only Altai lake that warms up to an acceptable temperature in summer, so there are many sanatoriums around and there are so many people in August that the poor lake resembles a pot of thick soup.
And in March it's good, almost deserted, the Katun is under the ice, cloudy and warm, the thermometer is +16, the snow is ankle-deep, it's wet and skiing is cancelled.
Some of us at that moment dreamed of trying ourselves on the ski slope, arguing that even the laziest employees with skis were already photographed! Knowing the luck of these "some", my answer was: well, you take a picture, what's the problem? At that time, the weather ruined the dreams of a ride, although on the morning of March 6 we left Novosibirsk at -25.
Let's go in a crowd of ten people, renting a familiar house with a huge hearth in advance. The men were ready to show off their culinary talents, bake fish with lemon, cheese and onions, but they would never go to cook "every routine" for a crowd starving from the road. The mood was lousy, my girlfriend and I alone had the task of feeding the whole gang, while we didn’t have to think that these “cooking virtuosos” would help at least peel potatoes, at best, they could only pour a glass for the ladies.
In the process of this despondency in the village, “electricity ran out”, the boiler was moved to the hearth, which had previously burned only for warmth, candles had to be lit and a miracle happened: everyone suddenly spoke in an undertone, it became somehow festive, - we no longer hoped! Unfortunately, by eleven o'clock the electricity was turned on, and the pretty drunk friends decided to sing. Since then, I hate karaoke, in a wooden house, although it was about three floors, there was nowhere to go from this horror.
The only entertainment left is walking around the neighborhood, a bathhouse with dipping into an ice hole (the men drove us away) and drinking.
Ice on the Katun
It was necessary to return on the morning of the 8th, the last day off, firstly, and secondly and most importantly, in connection with the holiday, cars on the road should have been at a minimum, but normal people are celebrating! And so it happened, we calmly passed the border between the Altai Mountains and the Altai Territory, and then the sunny weather began to change, the wind blew and a real blizzard began twenty kilometers from Biysk. For the first time, I realized what kind of snowstorm Pushkin wrote about, we crawled along the road "by touch", almost not seeing our hood, sometimes the rear dimensions of a car were highlighted from the darkness, sometimes flashing yellow lights of equipment.
We got out of the blizzard only closer to the border with our Novosibirsk region, the temperature dropped at a rate of a degree per ten kilometers, in short, we returned home in a normal winter, ten hours against the usual six or seven.
Something didn't pull us to Altai after that.
But in the summer it’s a completely different matter!
(To be continued)
