tygerland.net

The world is a fairly impressive place. From arid deserts, to fertile plains, enormous shifting sheets of ice, dense rainforests, and rocky ravines, this planet is nothing if not spectacular. As an Englishman, whose motherland is God’s experiment in temperateness, the Altai Republic is a truly awe-inspiring place.

Winters are cold and the temperature can drop as low as minus 50ËšC, yet the summers are blisteringly hot, interspersed with heavy rainfall. Hugging the boarders of China, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, and Russia (of which it is an semi-autonomous republic), the region is both callously harsh and outrageously beautiful.

I doubt Canadians, New Zealanders, Highland Scots and suchlike, would be so impressed; after all, the planet is peppered with stunning mountain ranges and deep forested valleys. Even England’s own Lake District is similarly imposing, but this is conquered, tamed land; Altai is still a fierce undefeated wilderness much like the sprawling forests of North America.

The Altai people, much like their rural Siberian kin to the North, live in harmony with the land. They speak in hallowed terms about magical lakes and plants with miraculous medicinal properties. On the roadsides people sell vegetables they have grown in their small gardens, jams and honeys they have prepared themselves, and mushrooms and berries they have harvested from the surrounding forests. They work tirelessly through the summer to prepare for the uncompromising cruelty of the winter. Jams and pickles are bottled and accumulated in subterranean stores several meters deep, you see the small ventilation chimneys jutting out of the garden like submarine periscopes, if you looked closer, you would discover nearby the trapdoor, and inside a ladder down into the cool darkness.

The mountains are covered in evergreens, and only on the most severe cliff faces, or the very highest points, can you see the whiteness of the underlying rock. If a war were raged in this blessedly peaceful country, the people would no doubt decamp to the mountains and fight a guerrilla war of attrition that no conventional army could put down. Thankfully, regardless of its interesting geographical positioning, its people live in peace, battling only the elemental extremes.

Naturally the Altai people are individualists. There is little central government, thousands of miles away in Moscow, can offer them beyond the supranational protection of the political caucus. In fact there are now the quiet rumblings of separatism in the air. Increasingly a destination of tourism, the Altai Republic now has the financial resources to go it alone in the great wide world. However there is no ‘green grass’ European Union so deep into central Asia, and affiliation to Putin’s Russia is infinitely preferable to being a weakling mini-state which boarders the mighty and carnivorous China. Maybe cessation and subsequent integration into the Post-Soviet CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States) would satisfy Moscow and ensure Altai’s sovereign integrity. Personally, as most of the tourists are Russians, and a large proportion of the population are ethnically Russian, it makes sense to remain allegiant to the Kremlin.

Never in my life have I visited a part of the world and so instantly and powerfully wanted to remain. I want to go on weeklong hikes into the mountains and discover lakes, rivers, and passes. I want to take my mountain bike to the technical terrain of the forest paths, through streams, and over the many rope bridges that traverse the wide crashing rivers. I want to build a barbeque and cook freshly caught wild salmon and trout. I want to wake every morning to udder-fresh cows milk and a block of freshly churned butter.

I want that life.

I want to write novels about generations of Altai families and their tumultuous relationship with the land, their huge imposing neighbour to the north, and the unsympathetic elements. I want to capture the life and vistas in poetry and prose, and I want to report this alternate existence to readers in a Europe so increasingly cosseted from hardship.

Maybe, ironically, tourism may offer me the financial base to move out there. I would of course need to become fluent in Russian (even if, when conversing in the language, I am told I have a Georgian accent), but I am a writer, experienced mountain biker, glib in finance, and my first language is of course English, so I am sure I can wet my beak in this burgeoning industry. Riddled with fast-flowing, rock-edged rivers, the region is also a Mecca for rafters (the Altai team I’m told, is the world’s number one), and when I was a teenager I was also a keen rafter, so again more scope to find employment.

Enough is enough; my sterile existence in the UK has finally become intolerable. I have always had itchy feet, living all over England, but never firmly putting down roots. I escape into movies, politics, music, sports, my writing - never stopping to suffer the sheer boredom of my job and life in England. Finally I have found somewhere to be.

Maybe not this year, but certainly next year, I’m determined to go somewhere and make a new life for my family. I’m now determined that place will be Altai, or at least Southern Siberia. I don’t want mass-produced tasteless jam on my bread any longer; I want sweet homemade jam, made from adolescent strawberries spread over warm fresh bread. I want my tea infused with mountain-picked herbs. I want to see hawks, not sparrows, circling above (apologies to any house sparrows with Internet access - no offence intended).

I want to slow down my car to let cows meander across the road, and watch the same cows huddle in the bus-shelters when it rains. I want to pull over and freshen my face in babbling spring water. I want to see a field of a hundred thousand sunflowers illuminate the landscape. I want to see Babushka’s still washing their sheets in a local stream.

I want that life.