Full Circle
Day 15: Petropavlovsk

To breakfast. No sooner have I poked my head round the door of the dining room than I'm met by Igor who thrusts a spoonful of fresh raspberries into my mouth.
'Tradition!' he shouts. 'Start the day with a raspberry!'
He enjoys it that we laugh, though I don't think he understands why we laugh so much.
He is also highly satisfied with the weather for today we are to visit the Kronotsky Nature Reserve. It covers one and a half million hectares around Petropavlovsk, and the only way in is by helicopter.
I drive to the nearby airstrip with Sergei Alekseev, the director of the reserve. He is a slim, good-looking man in his late thirties, dressed in jeans, thick rubber-soled boots and a bright green fleece. He pulls on a pair of sun-glasses as we climb into his four-wheel drive Subaru. He swings it expertly around pot-holes and stray dogs screeching to a halt only once to buy cigarettes. His car, he tells me, is second-hand from Japan. Does anyone buy them new? I ask him. Sergei flicks out a lighted match, pulls on his cigarette and smiles at me as if I'd asked if he knew anyone who owned a Picasso.
There is quite a crowd waiting by the lumbering ME-8, a twin-engined helicopter operated in the new Russia by a private company. Apart from the pilot, there is a co-pilot, an engineer, the pilot's six-year-old son, a lady called Svetlana who is going to prepare a picnic for us, Konstantin our interpreter, and Igor's assistant, Sasha. It feels more like a family outing than a commercial enterprise.
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PALIN'S GUIDES
- Series: Full Circle
- Day: 15
- Country/sea: Eastern Russia
- Place: Petropavlovsk
- Book page no: 31
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