Encounters at an End of the World

NB: I know I still have only published Part I of the epic trip to Xinjiang, but thesis anxiety and general being busy have caused a fair deal of writer's block that a research trip to the Russian Far East seems to have loosened. So, to celebrate, here's something on Vladivostok:

I don’t know if it was the feeling of stepping off a bus for the first time in 4 hours, after 22 straight hours of travel on a night train, a taxi, a bus, another bus, and another taxi partially over only nominally paved roads to make it from Harbin Xiangfang Station to central Vladivostok. Or maybe that after three quarters of a year in China, the homesickness that had quietly been simmering had finally decided to burst in the open; and therefore it was the way the combination of late romantic architecture mixed with 60s social housing reminded me of my own far-off hometown of Gmunden, Austria, or maybe how the smell of the Pacific Ocean brought back memories of Los Angeles’ own June Gloom and long walks through the fog on the beach. Maybe it was the niceness of the small pedestrian zones that positively reminded me of Rekjyavik with their small cafes and shops (or maybe that was just the mist caressing your face in the way it did in Iceland’s February). Or maybe it was the scenery - the beautiful fog-wrapped hills surrounding the city, one of the cable-stayed bridges built for the APEC summit so high as to almost disappear into the low-hanging clouds, the combination of romantic European town centers with industrial port landscapes in the way that little flairs of Hausmannian constructions still frame seaside towns in Normandy. It might have been the smell of the first good hot chocolate from a cafe I’ve had in a year. Maybe it was just the fact that probably the most audacious of my start-of-the-year travel plans (Xinjiang, Tibet, and Vladivostok) had actually came true, something I truly thank my amazing fellow travelers (and researchers, for this trip!) for. I don’t know which it was, or what combination of the above, that brought immense contentness to me upon reaching Vladivostok, a feeling that seemed to completely overpower the voice of the urbanist in me that would otherwise cringe at a pedestrian environment that made you walk underground to cross a two-lane road or lower emissions restrictions that made every tailpipe hurt the back of your throat (and there were many of them in the almost constant traffic jam). Somehow I even managed to not be bothered by the fact that our apart-hotel we had booked had not told us the location of our place and stopped answering our phone calls and thereby threatening us with a night literally left outside in the rain (though the one hour spent on the phone with hotels.com may have). I will say that being surrounded by cyrillic may be even more disheartening than traveling in China - at least reading Chinese for me gives me a feeling of accomplishment at the little bits of comprehension I manage, but cyrillic has enough similar-looking letters to Latin to endlessly frustrate my brain as it tries to form recognizable words or even recognizable sounds out of Pectopah and Уссурийск.

View from our balcony onto Aleutskaya ul.

The end of the Trans-Siberian, 1km out from Vladivostok Station

But whatever it is, Vladivostok has a special atmosphere, one that I am incredibly happy to have been able to experience. I imagine most European and American tourists probably see Vladivostok primarily at the end (or start) of a Trans-Siberian journey, but we arrived at a dumpy little bus station at the outskirts of the center city, giving us a travel gap that required a bit of negotiation with cab drivers to bridge (“traffic jam. Don’t want to go.” said one after hearing our destination downtown). Our trip had allowed us to fully appreciate the transition to a more urbanized area from the empty fields of the border region. After Ussuryisk (which, with a likely causal relationship, reminded me a bit of the parts of Hungary in which I have family - the Southeastern smaller cities defined by Soviet planning ideas), small towns began to regularly dot the landscapes, though the highway mainly revealed dark warehouses and such, with only the occasional small spire of an Orthodox church popping out of a cluster of buildings. By the airport, the environment and become semi-industrial exurb, and gave us a first glimpse of an inlet of the Pacific Ocean, in the distance. Finally, we reached city limits, though another twenty almost endless minutes would pass until the city widened from a small strip between mountains and ocean consisting mainly of the highway and a few housing developments. But once we hit Aleutskaya ul. in our cab Vladivostok gave its best impression of a mid-sized city in Europe with a storied past. Posters advertised the Mariinsky Far East Festival in July. But Vladivostok is not just a European city plopped down in the Far East. Chinese signs abounded, and the presence was felt at least the third time I had to 对不起 my way into a supermarket aisle. A giant modernist skyscraper with a Russian flag flapping loudly in the wind graced the “Square of the Fighters for the Soviet Powers.” And then, there was of course the Russian Pacific Fleet (well, most of its fighting craft. The submarines are in Petropavlovsk if I’m not mistaken), all five destroyers and one cruiser, plus the first Russian warship in the region, a 1923 steam/sailing ship that still fires its guns once a day as a museum.

But don’t get me wrong--this is the most remote large city I have been to in my life. The next closest city of similar size in the same country is found nearly 800km North in Khabarovsk, and any closer destinations of that magnitude would involve crossing that same border that took us 4 hours twice (and honestly, I don’t know how much Mudanjiang is worth a trip…). I can’t begin to imagine what life is like here, an area that ‘European’ Russians regard with a certain mythology of a ‘wild wild East’ removed from their normal consciousness and that the Kremlin only pays attention to every once in a while when its leaders remember they want to be a player in the Asia-Pacific sphere and promise major infrastructural and developmental upgrades (that, spoiler alert, usually seem to disappear and fizzle out soon after their announcements). The closest borders are with China and North Korea, with anti-Chinese sentiment having flaring up in strong ways in the 90s, and still doing so occasionally. Putin received 6 percentage points fewer votes in the last presidential election than nationally.And yes, it is isolated. Sure, there’s an airport, and Aeroflot offers four flights a day to Moscow (9 hours), but the hinterland of the city looks more like Europe would if it had 1/10th the population, and ties with neighboring countries seem to amount to little more than shuttle traders importing cheap consumer goods from China (the hard way, via the Suifenhe-Pogranichny border crossing we came in on) and cars from Korea and Japan (resulting in many taxis having the driver’s seat on the right and dials in Japanese). Allegedly, a local joke about the Lenin statute determinedly pointing South-East in front of the train station has him pointing the way to a better future… by suggesting a move to Japan.

Pedestrian zone on ul. Admirala Fokina

The business end of Vladivostok Station,
with evening commuter traffic

Either way, my first trip to Russia has been an eventful and fascinating one. I ran into a European city on the Pacific Ocean, though one with many more signs in Chinese than you would find West of the Urals. I found a beautiful old town, sandwiched between hills and a port landscape to rival the best of them. I experienced a June fog and low-to-mid tens temperature ranges that felt incredible after weeks of the hot and humid mess that is summer in Beijing. And I found a city I would like to return to, understanding how useless I would be on my own without a Russian speaker with me. Was it worth the $200 in visa fees and the intense 麻烦 required to be allowed in this country? Current Kevin, who decided to worry about future budgeting when he gets back to Beijing, thinks so at least as he stares contemplatively down Aleutskaya ul from his 5th floor walk-up’s balcony.


Простите, Я не говорю по-русски. До свидания.