Through Siberia By Accident by Dervla Murphy
Dervla Murphy has been traveling and writing for as long as I have been reading. Her travels are often punctuated by mishaps, and the By Accident in the title of this latest account, her twentieth book, is meant both metaphorically and literally: a planned bicycling trip to the Russian Far East was cut short by an injury to her knee on the train journey East, resulting instead in a trip by train and boat in and around Siberia’s Lake Baikal.
Her plans awry, Murphy is forced to rely on the serendipitous, and ends up making a circle from Tynda in Eastern Siberia to Severobaikal at the north end of Lake Baikal, down the lake to Irkutsk, back around to Ust’-Kust, down the Lena (i.e. northeast) to Yakutsk in the Republic of Sakha, and back to Tynda. This is largely but not entirely off the beaten path - Baikal has been a tourist destination of sorts for quite some time and other travelers have described Siberia - but Murphy has a knack of meeting interesting people (or at least people whom she makes interesting) and few people, surely, travel the Lena for the fun of it: Murphy makes it sound like the old Mississippi, paddle boat and all.
Siberia is an almost incomprehensibly huge and very sparsely populated tract of land: those places even slightly known to outside comprise only a tiny portion of the area. Murphy brings the place and its people to life. She is erudite on the history, sociology and, especially, the ecology of the place. Of course, she is something of a character herself, with strongly expressed opinions: the non-commercial simplicity of Siberia (some might say isolation and backwardness) appeal to her. She also has a fondness and quite astounding capacity for beer—two litres of the stuff merits the adverb “only”—obviously a 70-year-old babushka (grandmother) who can handle a solo trip through Siberia can handle her liquor as well.
I have not been to Siberia but I have been to Murphy’s originally-planned destination. Murphy seems to be admirably able to look past the blight of Soviet and more recent Russian “development” (and developments) to the natural beauty beyond. Personally, I found it rather more difficult.
An otherwise fine book was marred by some unfortunate errors, perhaps forgiveable by a newcomer and non-Russian speaker, but the publisher should have caught them. She mentions that the BAM railway in 1945 “carried troops and equipment to defend Sakhalin Island and the Kuril Islands”. Presumably “invade” rather than “defend” is meant. There is no place “Kirgiztan”. The most egregious is the sign marking the 370th anniversary of Yakutsk, transcribed as “370 aet” - or “370 let” as it would be spelled in Russia. This was surely originally in capital letters, where the Cyrillic “L” is like a “Lambda”, an upper-case “A” without the cross-bar. “370 AET” might have been close, but someone typeset it in lowercase. The author may not have needed to speak Russian but at some point someone should have.