CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
Introduction
COLDEST
Oymyakon, Siberia
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
DRIEST
Arica, Chile
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
HOTTEST
Dallol, Ethiopia
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
WETTEST
Mawsynram, India
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
Index
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
A lot of people put a lot of energy into this book and the accompanying television series. Most of them live in the world’s extreme places and appear in these pages. I am grateful to them all for so generously contributing their time and assistance. I would also particularly like to thank those whose names follow, though in no particular order.
At Keo Films: Will Anderson, Alethea Palmer, Annette Gordon, Havana Marking, Katherine Perry and Claire Hamilton.
In Siberia: Andrey Koriakine, Olga Vasilievna Ulturgasheva, Dima Govorukhin, Usik Igor, Guy Pugh, Godfrey Kirby and Tom Holland.
In Chile: Christian Gonzales, Pablo Osses, Ana Monzon-Monzon, Dennis Beauchamp, Michael Tien and Gethin Aldous.
In Ethiopia: Valerie Browning, Ishmael Ali Garde, Mr Bisrat, Tony Hickey, Mohamed Fayez Marei, Paul Paragon and Dudu Douglas-Hamilton.
In India and Bangladesh: Runa Marre, Khandaker Badrul Alam (‘Babu’), Dulci Wallang, Maan Barua, Rajan Chakravarty, James Perry, Claudia Morris, Ali Kazimi and Lainie Knox.
In Britain: Toby Sculthorp, Mark Carwardine, Thierry du Bois, Anabel Leventon, Katherine Vincent, Robert Twigger, Tahir Shah, Andrew Goudie, Alan Downes, Kevin Duncan, Margot Eardley, Shayne Jackson, Debbie Willett, Emma Tait and Julian Flanders.
Special thanks go to David Tibballs – director of the films in Chile and India – for his good humour and amazing stamina, and Zam Baring, film editor extraordinaire. Extra special thanks go to Andrew Palmer – director of the films in Siberia and Ethiopia – who had faith in the project from the word go and the extraordinary energy to see it through; Doreen Montgomery for her encouragement, enthusiasm and eagle eye; and Lorraine Desai for her support throughout a long year.
INTRODUCTION
The man in the city-slicker shirt carried his bottle over to my table as I was finishing my dinner and asked if he could join me. He sat down and introduced himself as Charles. Charles was interested to know about England, he said, starting with where it was. He furrowed his brow as if he were trying to remember, ‘It’s near the USA, isn’t it?’
‘Not really,’ I said, ‘closer to France and Portugal.’
‘Ah, yes,’ he nodded knowingly, and took a swig from his beer bottle. ‘Is it cold there?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ I told him, ‘especially in these months.’
‘Is there hail and snow?’
I nodded.
‘Gosh!’ he exclaimed, ‘there’s no hail, snow or even ice here – it’s a normal climate. In England I would die in one day.’
Ideas are curious things, and you don’t always recognize them when they creep up on you. I didn’t realize it at the time, but that brief exchange in a restaurant in central Mozambique had sown the seed for a book that wasn’t to germinate for almost ten years.
I was sitting at my desk at home, gazing out into my back garden as the sun beat down, when that snippet of conversation with Charles came back to me. After writing travelogues on Outer Mongolia and Mozambique, my last two volumes had taken me to places closer to home. Europe and the US southern states had been interesting but to my mind they hardly counted as real adventures. And a real adventure was what I was searching for as I sat comfortably in middle England, at the heart of the mid-latitudes, reaching middle age.
The memory of that exchange with Charles all those years before had been prompted by a report on the television news of another drought in Britain. British people are obsessed with the weather. It’s a constant topic of conversation, and TV weather presenters can become national heroes. The Scandinavians have a similar interest, but their passion doesn’t quite match up to that of the Brits. Whether it’s too hot or too cold, we moan about it. A flood usually causes a national outcry, but only until the next drought comes along, and then we wonder what happened to all the floodwaters.
But, if the truth be told, the weather we get in Britain is never really extreme. It’s actually very moderate and middle-of-the-road. Like the British themselves, their weather is all very temperate and restrained. What then, I thought to myself, was it like in places where they really have something to complain about? After several days of wading through reference books, I had an idea of where I could go to find out. The world’s hottest, coldest, wettest and driest inhabited towns were spread across three continents and their climatic records left me speechless. The annual temperature in Dallol, Ethiopia averaged a searing 34.5ºC (94ºF), whereas Oymyakon in Siberia had recorded a staggering low of -71.2ºC (-96ºF). Every year, Mawsynram in India received an extraordinary 11,872 mm (nearly 39 feet) of rainfall, while Arica in Chile got virtually none at all.
I wanted to investigate the day-to-day challenges of life at the planet’s maxima and minima, to compare and contrast the climatically excessive and the meteorologically destitute. Thirty years after putting the first man on the moon, how good was human society at coping with our own planet’s extremes? And why did people live in such places? Were they pioneers battling against the elements in search of untold riches? Were they society’s outcasts, relegated to inhospitable climes? Or were they so assimilated to their local climatic peculiarities that they hardly noticed?
I felt I needed a dose of something extreme to get the juices flowing, so I set out to see some properly severe and excessive weather.
C O L D E S T
O y m y a k o n
S i b e r i a
O N E
A week before leaving I checked the daily weather report for Siberia and saw a deep purple patch on the temperature map of Russia depicting less than -40°C (-40°F) for virtually the whole of the area I would be travelling through. Oymyakon, the coldest town on Earth, was enjoying a balmy -53°C (-63°F). I was rather pleased with myself. I couldn’t have timed it better.
I became rather less content when the British media started running stories about Siberia’s cruellest winter in living memory. I watched sorry pictures of a hospital in Irkutsk as the voice-over said that its staff had been overwhelmed by 200 frostbite victims in a fortnight. The BBC’s woman on the spot matter-of-factly stated that the surgeons had run out of anaesthetic after performing 60 amputations that week. Faint screaming could be heard coming from the operating theatre behind the reporter. This was followed by pictures of Nikolai Dobtsov, a driver whose truck had broken down a long way from anywhere. After six hours in the biting cold, he had managed to fix his vehicle and drive to hospital. When he got there, they had to cut off his hands and feet. I was beginning to think that perhaps this wasn’t such a great idea after all.
Sitting in my nice warm home in Oxford planning the trip, I’d read numerous articles about survival in extreme cold. I had learned how to prevent, recognize and treat frostbite, hypothermia and a range of other cold-weather injuries. I knew about the dangers of snow blindness, and the importance of maintaining my body’s core temperature. But reading all this advice was one thing, seeing Nikolai Dobtsov with all four limbs reduced to bandaged stumps was quite another. And this guy lived in Siberia. He mu
st have been well aware of the dangers, even adapted to them up to a point. What chance would I have, a mid-latitude man who had read a few books about winter-related illnesses? To say that my blood ran cold would be understating the matter.
But it was too late. I’d paid for my flight and worked out my itinerary. Vehicles had been booked and people were expecting me. There was nothing for it but to buy yet another pair of thermals and make a start. I’d wanted an adventure, now I was going to get one.
It hit me as soon as I stepped out of the railway station at Irkutsk. I felt a tingly feeling in my nostrils that was caused by the hairs in my nose instantaneously freezing. I took a deep breath and immediately regretted it because the shock of the cold air in my lungs set me off on an extended bout of coughing that felt like I’d been smoking forty a day since before puberty. Half a minute later, as the coughing subsided, the skin all over my face began to feel as if it were burning. I had already lost contact with my toes and my fingers were heading the same way. It was -41°C (-42°F) and I’d arrived in Siberia. During the five minutes I waited for the arrival of my driver, I was seriously concerned that my nose might fall off.
My face, fingers and toes became more painful as they warmed up on the short journey to the Hotel Angara. As you would expect in January, the streets of Irkutsk were lined with chest-high piles of shovelled snow beside the pavements, but the roads were well gritted and clear except for a light sprinkling of fresh snow on the compacted ice. At home, anyone fool enough to be out for a drive in such conditions would be doing so with extreme caution, but here the familiarity of a seven-month winter had bred total contempt. Everyone was driving like maniacs.
We swept past old wooden houses and lines of Soviet-style tenement blocks, on one occasion getting stuck behind a lumbering bus as it accelerated away from its stop. It billowed white exhaust fumes like an ancient steam engine, temporarily reducing our visibility to near zero.
I had found my driver through a local non-governmental organization called Baikal Environmental Wave, dedicated to conserving the world’s deepest freshwater lake, which is situated a few kilometres down the road from Irkutsk. Dima was an environmental inspector with the organization, but like so many Russians today he was not averse to doing a bit of freelance work on the side.
Founded about 350 years ago, Irkutsk started out like many Siberian settlements, as a wooden fort surrounded by a stockade built by Cossacks who came to the great Siberian wilderness in search of furs. The fur trade still plays a significant part in the city’s commerce, and Dima drove me past its fur market, ‘the largest one in Siberia’ he said. It only works three days a week and today was not one of those days, so all I saw was lines of deserted wooden stalls in the open air. I did a double take. ‘The market is outside?’ I asked incredulously. ‘Of course,’ replied Dima. ‘Isn’t it rather cold?’ I enquired. ‘We don’t think so,’ he said breezily.
I was still reeling from this revelation when we pulled up outside the hotel, which dominated one side of a vast park full of ice sculptures shimmering in the midday sun. Irkutsk has attracted numerous admiring sobriquets during its history. In many ways the city lies at the heart of Siberia, with its proximity to Lake Baikal, its status as a major hub on the trans-Siberian railway and a fine legacy of classical wooden mansions and grandiose public buildings dating from a gold-rush period in the late nineteenth century. I had passed through it once on the trans-Siberian and had always yearned for a closer look at the ‘Paris of Siberia’. My first glimpse of the Hotel Angara gave me the distinct impression that the former Soviet authorities had baulked at the comparison with such a potent symbol of western decadence. So they put up a horrible pile of 1960s’ plate glass and characterless concrete instead.
Its appearance wasn’t the only vestige of the old USSR that was alive and well in the Hotel Angara. I spent an extended period in nearby Mongolia in the late 1980s, where I had my first taste of a Westerner’s life under the old Soviet regime, and the Hotel Angara provided more than a few doses of déjà vu. The first came in the form of the carpet that led me to my room down a corridor of interminable proportions. It was mostly red, with a green and yellow border. It was exactly the same design that had adorned the floors of the Hotel Ulan Bator in Mongolia nearly 15 years previously. I had seen it elsewhere too, in Mongolian government buildings and in hotels in Moscow. Goodness only knows how many thousands of miles of this carpet had been produced, probably in a single carpet factory somewhere in the old Soviet Union.
Inside my room, attached to one wall, was another throwback to those heady days. It was an oblong, blue and white plastic radio with just one knob, the volume control. In the Hotel Ulan Bator in 1987 this infernal machine had very nearly driven me insane. It was permanently tuned to the state radio station that broadcast a staple diet of military marching music and stirring pronouncements on the latest production targets achieved by the country’s heroic herdsmen. The worst thing about the radio was that it was impossible to turn off. You could turn down the volume, but never to an inaudible level. As a result I had spent many an unpleasant night in the Hotel Ulan Bator with my pillow over my head trying in vain to block out the triumphalist Soviet tunes.
On entering my room in the Hotel Angara I immediately confronted the plastic radio, which, as expected, was playing a little light marching music. The memories of sleepless nights were so immediately vivid for me that I was fully prepared to commit an instant act of wanton destruction. I reached for the volume control and turned it. To my surprise, the music faded to absolute silence. At least some progress had been made in post-Soviet Russia.
Down in the restaurant that first night, the trip down Soviet memory lane continued with a fat and surly waitress who stood glaring over me as I went through the menu. She could have saved us both a lot of time if she’d come straight out and told me that all the items on the extensive menu were off except what they had. This was pilmeni (mutton parcels in a light broth) and chicken Kiev, the latter straight out of a packet. As it was, it took almost 15 minutes of enquiries after the availability of various unobtainable delicacies before she told me what I was going to eat for dinner.
Loud, tinny, melancholic Russian rock music, played on an electric organ, seeped out of a large loudspeaker mounted somewhere out of sight as I surveyed the scene. The only other occupied table in the substantial eatery was populated by a group of drunken Russian men who were nearing old age but well past the inebriation stage. It was Saturday night and their intentions were clear.
The surly waitress banged a bottle of Baltika beer down on the table in front of me. The beer was warm, as it turned out to be everywhere else in Siberia when it was available. Unsurprising, I suppose, given the sub-zero temperatures outside. But the heating was off, so it cooled down pretty fast.
The restaurant walls were all in shiny polished wood panelling, adorned with cock-eyed paintings of terrible landscapes, leavened here and there with reproductions of old prints of Irkutsk. Plastic ivy dangled from a central column. The floor was pink and white mock crazy paving. Six of the eleven ceiling lights were working. As I ploughed my way through the cardboard chicken Kiev, I noticed a small token of twenty-first century Russia in the retro restaurant scene. The paper serviettes, softer than the toilet paper, but only just, were decorated with Christmas holly motifs. All religious festivals had been frowned upon by the former communist regime.
But some things are timeless. As I finished my beer, the old guys were just getting into their stride. I knew it was going to turn into a serious session when one of them turned up the music and grabbed the crabby waitress by her substantial midriff, whirling her into a lurching waltz. To my surprise she offered little resistance. In fact, she almost smiled. I left as two of the other old guys started fighting.
For my baptism in Siberia I had made contact with a group of people in the city of Angarsk, a short drive from Irkutsk up the Angara River, the only river flowing out of Lake Baikal. Baptism it was literally going
to be, because these hardy Angarsk residents were members of what is known as a walrus club. Russians have long been partial to winter bathing and those brave enough to swim in ice holes are known as walruses.
I’d read a bit about the Russians’ soft spot for this type of behaviour and learned that in pre-revolutionary times it was traditional to take a dip through an ice hole during Epiphany, usually dressed in a long shirt. Decades of communist-inspired atheism had discouraged this tradition, but in recent years the walrus clubs have been making a comeback. I’d just missed Epiphany, but it didn’t matter. Every Sunday during winter, the Angarsk walrus club drove in convoy to a spot on the frozen Kitoy River, a tributary of the Angara, and took the plunge through a hole in the ice.
I had to admit to having mixed feelings about the whole concept. I had contacted the Angarsk walrus club in a fit of child-like enthusiasm about things Siberian while the idea was still a romantic dream. But as we drove north-west out of Irkutsk through the snowscape I was beginning to have my doubts. The temperature that morning was -38°C (-36°F). Despite the fact that stripping off and going for a swim in seriously sub-zero temperatures was supposed to be good for your health, I was not convinced. Lots of unpleasant things are promoted as ‘good for you’ and one of the advantages of being an adult is supposed to be that you can decide for yourself on such issues. On further consideration, having now arrived in the midst of Siberia’s cruellest winter in living memory, I decided that joining a walrus club for the afternoon would not be good for me. On the contrary, I had an inkling that it might be positively dangerous to my health. Indeed, the possibility of having a heart attack came to mind.
As we drove up the main street of Angarsk, the lamp-posts adorned alternately with metal silhouettes of a red star and a hammer and sickle, my mind started racing. I thought perhaps I could feign heart palpitations. Or maybe I could contrive some other excuse, like it was too soon after lunch, or too long after Epiphany. Perhaps I could just say I’d forgotten my swimming trunks. It was -38°C, for God’s sake! Perhaps that would be enough.
Going to Extremes Page 1
