Ulan Ude

I arranged for local tour guides through a friend from Moscow. On Wednesday, I met up with them in the shadow of an enormous Lenin statue - well, just his head, actually - on the central square of Ulan Ude.

Andrey and Svetlana are a really nice couple in their late 40's. They're professional guides now, shepherding around tourists brave enough to get off the Trans-Siberian Railroad and explore Buryatia. They do pretty well at it, but there aren't too many takers at this time of year.

We immediately drove some 20km outside of town to a datsan, or Buddhist temple. This particular one is the center of Buddhism in Russia, long a traditional religion in these parts. The complex is dramatically located on a windswept, desolate plain with snowpeaked mountains in the background. Svetlana showed me around and explained the finer points of theology and how they are represented in the art and architecture. We saw chanting monks, spun the prayer wheels, watched prayer flags flap in the icy breeze, and got a blessing in one of the temples. The blessing involved a somewhat solid knock on the head with along wooden scroll box wielded by a monk.

We had lunch in a yurt and talked about a trip out to Baikal. Andrey showed me beautiful pictures of the lake in full freeze, amazing jumbles of ice that they drove their car out to see. "Wonderful," I said. "When did you take these?" - expecting an answer like January. "Last week," he answered. "You'll be able to do this now。“

Next to the yurt is the ethnographic museum, an outdoor collection of wooden houses representing the different populations of the republic. It was impressive, and since most of the staff knew Svetlana, they lifted the ropes and unlocked doors to let us into the exhibits themselves.

The next day, Andrey took me to an even more remote datsan in the foothills of the mountains. We pulled off the crumbling highway and drove over a grassy plain to get there. An ancient man and a young monk went door-to-door looking for the keys to the main temple. Actually, they'd walk up to a house and bang on the windows, not the doors. No one could find the keys, though, in the small cluster of adjacent houses. Then they realized that they were wrapped in cloth and stuffed into the door jambs right next to the heavy padlocks.

We drove further toward the mountains over a path in the fields in Andreys station wagon. The frame squeaked and groaned as we picked our way across. He told me about similar trips in the snow and how the monks twice had to come save him.

At the end of our path we found a children's camp where the caretaker is an old friend of Andrey's. Adjacent to the cam is a spring that bubbles up and runs off into the woods.

The caretaker hitched ride back to "town" with us (the village near the datsan) and talked about how he hasn't had lights in 2 months. Which is to say - no electricity at all. He pointed out areas where he sees bears, where wolves hunt in packs, etc. All of which, mind you, he was going to have to walk back through to get back to the camp.

"I've known that guy my whole life," Andrey said as we dropped him off for cigarettes in the village. "Well, except for the 15 years he was in prison, that is." As our passenger gesticulated, I noticed the telltale prison tattoos on his hands. Andrey assured me that he was a completely changed man. In any case, maybe the bears and wolves are the ones who should watch their step in the woods.

We drove to another village along a royal rod built in one day in 1991. Princess Anne visited the area to help organize international charity efforts, and the authorities had to scramble to put an infrastructure in place to even facilitate a visit: bridges, roads, and this one street that leads off the highway to the front door of the village medical center. That is, the former medical center; I guess the charity efforts didn't go so well after all.

In the village, I had a cultural lesson at a charming Buryat woman's house, Geerla. It was interesting but had the potential to be a little canned. They were excited to have aRussiann speaking guest, though, and that allowed me to get them off script and have some fun. I got to ask insightful questions like "Exactly what is a Buryat" and hide under the cover of being a foreigner with weak language skills.