Where are them bears!??

I know people have different opinions about Siberia. Even in Moscow the stereotypes were comical, if anything: big trees, too much snow, wild people, wild animals. Bears even! My student Staz told me that if I went to Krasnoyarsk, no matter what I did, I was NOT to go wandering in the woods, where there were....dangerous animals!

As soon as I left Ekaterinburg to head even further into Siberia, I wondered what awaited me in Krasnoyarsk. For the first evening hours of my 38 hour train ride from Ekaterinburg to Krasnoyarsk, my neighbors at first took on a more sinister, grizzly look in my less than plushy platzcart wagon. Nobody spoke much at first, but once you got them going, there was no stopping the conversation. Turned out my neighbor on the train was my neighbor in Moscow too, living only one metro stop away from me. We joked about California (Schwarzenegger came up inevitably) and soon our group of 4 had a running joke going about how the governator now lived in a tiny village in Siberia with the bears (medved, as I soon became familiar with this new word). Eventually a lady further down in the compartment came by and yelled at us to keep quiet, and we all drifted off to sleep.

When I did make it to Krasnoyarsk, I was surprised again. I had been expecting some tiny, rugged town, far from everything, as my friend from this town had explained to me before I left Moscow. But as I walked around the streets it became more obvious to me that this wasn't the sort of place a bear would enjoy strolling around in. It was, dare I say, modern. The buildings looked clean and bright, and the streets were so well groomed I wondered for a moment if I was back in some cute tiny roadstop town in the US. I'm sorry to say the only bear I found in Krasnoyarsk was in my coffee cup, just a fancy motif created by the barrista out of cream.

But that isn't the charm of Krasnoyarsk. Sure the main street is well kept with cute music blasting away, and there are plenty of fountains, not to mention a nice looking university. What was incredible was the mountains. Right across the river, you could see why people head to Krasnoyarsk for skiing, I might as well have been in the Swiss Alps.

Of course one of the top things on my list to do was to go to the Stolby National Park, which I had only heard rave reviews about. Managing to convince a couchsurfer and his friend to join me on the quest, we headed out, for the several hour climb to the top of a mountain, where rock columns loomed above it all, just begging to be climbed. As I picked my way through the boulders and ice patches, I managed to reach the top, just in time to catch my breath, as I looked around and saw for the first time, true Siberian wilderness. Ok, so maybe there was a bear or two out there somewhere, but that didn't matter. For as far as the eye could see, was pure forest, and it was beautiful.