Plokštinė missle base

I had read that there was an accessible ex-soviet underground missile silo located around 50km north east of Klapedia. It was going to be impossible to get there via public transport, so me and a few people I had met in Lithuania decided to hire a car for the day and drive out there.

The Plokštinė missile base is located near lake Plateliai, in the centre of a national park. It was built in 1962 and housed R-12U intermediate range ballistic missiles, tipped with 2 megaton thermonuclear warheads pointed deep into the heart of Europe.

The national park it was built in was quite beautiful. We had lunch by the lake. Birds were singing and flowers were blooming, and just a few hundred meters away was the base, hidden in a forest clearing.

The base was closed in 1978 as the Americans had learnt of the location of the base through satellite photography and the place was looted and vandalised by the local population. After the collapse of the USSR the base was turned over to the national park administration who have made it an 'Exposition of Militarism' and run guided tours on request. I tried to get into the site, however it was locked up tight. The blast doors are designed to handle 300PSI overpressure, so there was no way I could force my way in. We dropped by the national park office and picked up a nice ranger who gave us a tour for around $10 AUS.

It was amazing to be in a site that would have featured prominantly in the end of the world. Most of the equipment had been removed by looters, however our guide had talked to several ex-soviet generals and gave us a full run down of the day to day operation of the base. Reportedly there were only 2 times this base became fully active with warheads loaded and rockets fueled, during the Cuban missile crisis, and when Czechoslovakia tried to move away from the USSR's doctrinal line in communism.

There are four silos, each covered with a retractable blast door (as seen above). When the missiles were armed and the blast door withdrawn they could be fueled and launched in half an hour.

This tunnel goes to the fuel storage tanks. There were massive tanks of Kerosene and Nitric acid that would send the missiles to England, Germany, Turkey and the other NATO targets in Western Europe. OPACNO means 'DANGER' in Russian, it was sprayed onto the wall after a Lithuanian man crawled into a fuel tank to scrape the Aluminum from the tank and was overcome by the fumes and died.

The silos themselves were around 28 meters deep, and 6m across. The missile inside would have been much narrower, however there was room needed for technicians and fueling equipment. The rockets on launch would have become so hot that they had cut a tunnel from the lake to flood the silos as the launch occurred to cool them.

All in all a very cool urbex location. Oh, I am also now in Poland. Krakow is very nice. Anyway, Till next time.

Spring

When I arrived in China it was the height of winter and all the trees had lost their leaves. Mongolia was much the same, the grass was dead and brown and the trees were bare. The further north I travelled the more snow replaced dead grass as the ground cover.

On the Mongolian steppe and on Olkhon Island, Lake Baikal I did give some thought to how the place would look in summer with greenery, however I did get used to a palette of brown and black for dead grass and winter trees, white for clouds and snow and the blue of a clear sky.

I noticed the snow was melting first. White streets of snow turned brown with mud. Every car drove around with a brown mud coating, and my boots came back dirty each day.
The ice was melting also. I saw the Angara river twice in a week, before and after travelling to Lake Baikal. The first time it had a layer of ice covering it, and people sitting in groups fishing through holes in the ice. The second time the ice was only near the shore, and the river was flowing very rapidly indeed, with chunks of ice breaking of and being carried down stream.

Seasonal awareness has only come recently to me, I was walking through a park in Riga and was surprised to notice all the trees had small green orbs attached to their branches, naturally I did know what was going on, however I had never given it much notice in Australia, many trees are green all year round. When most of the trees stay green, the deciduous ones budding in spring don't have the same impact. When everything loses its colour and signs of life, the first leaves budding seem quite special. Over the last week I have watched the changes in the flora avidly.

In Australia colour usually signalled spring for me, however it was the colour of the flowers that bloom at this time. I haven't seen many flowers yet this spring however I am more than sure that spring is on its way. As I left Russia I saw from the bus fields of dead grass being burnt. Now as I travel from Latvia to Lithuania the fields are green with small shoots and the trees are thinly covered with the beginnings of leaves.

There are of course some evergreen trees in this part of the world, I saw many in Siberia, however my impression of them was an image of deep winter. I caught a train from Irkutsk to Tomsk leaving late in the night. The area around Irkutsk was quite open, and most of the snow for the season had melted. When I awoke in the morning on the train to Tomsk, we were travelling through a thick Fir forest and it was snowing heavily. There was snow drifts banked up around the tree line, and every branch was white on top with snow and a dark green below.

I am leaving Villinus tonight to take a train across Lithuania to a town called Klapedia on the Baltic sea. Enjoy the change in season.

St Petersberg to the Baltics

This will be another one of those I-promise-to-give-a-proper-update-later posts, as my time is limited and this computer is so slow it is infuriating.

After Moscow I took a night train to St Petersberg. I didn't get much sleep, as I was in the middle of a carriage with a year 10 school excursion. It was quite amusing as I was on the aisle and could watch the teacher walk up and down the carriage checking on the kids. They were all drinking beer on the sly and hiding it when the teacher came past.
St Petersberg is a fantastic city. Canals and gilded church domes are set amongst beautiful 18th century buildings. There are so many amazing things in St Petersberg that I would love to write about now, however this computer is so slow I can't open or edit any of my photos.

I arrived in Latvia 3 days ago, and have spent my time walking around the world heritage listed city of Riga. Medieval cobbled streets and old buildings topped with spires and castellation make this the city feel the oldest of all I have been in. The city recently celebrated its 800th anniversary, so this feeling does have some basis.

Today I went to a shooting range in an old soviet bunker. I shot a Glock 9mm, an AK-47 and a pump action shotgun. Firing the Glock was interesting, it was so small a thing for the noise and recoil it made. This of course was nothing compared to the noise and recoil of the AK. I was firing it in single shot mode, as if it had been on a burst there is no way I would have got anywhere near the target, as it kicked a good 5 degrees up with the recoil. My first shot was quite a shock, it does indeed sound like something has exploded next to your head (for good reason). There must be some serious OH&S issues for guerrilla fighters, as they would go deaf pretty damn fast. I was wearing hearing protection and it was still damn loud.
The shotgun was probably the most fun to fire, and half of that was the pumping action. It was also very loud, but had more of a booming sound and less of the crack of the AK.

Tomorrow I am heading out of leaving Riga, Latvia and heading to Vilnius, Lithuania.

flip it...

Moscow

At the moment I am in Moscow.

I went and paid my respects to Lenin the other day. After queueing up for half an hour or so, and undergoing the security screening, I descended into his tomb. The security was quite intense, you couldn't bring anything at all into the tomb, they only allowed mobiles if it didn't have a camera. You had to keep your hands out of your pockets and in view the entire time you were 'in the presence'. The soldiers on guard must be paid extra to keep the same stern expression on their face all day, and you would think after years of hanging out with a dead body you would have a slightly warped sense of humor, but none of them looked in the slightest bit amused when I waved to Lenin.

The man himself was lying in a glass coffin, and illuminated brightly in a dark room. Many people have said he looks like a wax model, and that may be true as he did have a slightly waxy look about him. There are no spots or blemishes on him at all, and his facial hair is impeccably groomed. He looks as if he is peacefully sleeping.

I will be staying in Moscow for two more days, then heading to St Petersberg. I have put a number of photos from the last few weeks up on Flickr, at the time of this post they are not organised but they will be eventually.

High and low in Ulan-Ude

Before I left Australia, A friend was telling me about her experiences in Russia. She said she found it a place of emotional extremes, and that she found herself laughing one moment and cursing the fact she came the next. My experience in Ulan-Ude quickly showed me what she meant by this.

My easy going work-it-out-when-you-get-there attitude seem to work for me in most instances, however I have noticed that it has severely failed me on several occasions where planning has been necessary. My arrival into Russia was one of these instances. As I mentioned earlier, I have been on the move pretty much constantly since leaving Beijing. Within 12 hours of arriving in Mongolia I was out on a jeep trek in the Mongolian steppe, however before leaving the capital I booked my train ticket from Mongolia to Russia. I booked it to Ulan-Ude as I had read some nice things about the place. When I got back to the capital of Mongolia I had to get straight back on the train to Russia. While on the train I realised that the train arrived in Ulan-Ude at 10:30pm, I hadn't booked any accommodation and I hadn't had a chance to change any money into roubles. I had a feeling this might be a problem, and it was.

Leaving the station immediatly felt quite obviously like a foreigner, as I had a massive backpack and was walking around hesitantly with a map. I did a number of laps of the СBD before finding an ATM that would accept my card and give me roubles. I did find one but I didn't feel all that safe knowing I was now carrying 5000 roubles in cash, it was midnight and that I still had to find a hotel. There were large numbers of drunk russians hanging around the city and while several of them had approached me in an unfriendly manner, while I was walking to a hotel a group did come up and give me a beer to drink. While I was drinking this another man that I had noticed following me earlier approached us and told the Russian guys to leave. He did it in a way that was as if he was doing me a favour, and then offered to show me to the hotel I was looking for. We were conversing in Russian, so I was not sure exactly what he was saying. I started to get a bit of a bad vibe about him and told him no, and that I was leaving. He stopped me and asked me a question in Russian that I didn't understand, but it ended in 'chelovek', a word for man. I then realised what was going on. He was asking me if I liked men, and was trying to pick me up.

Naturally I beat a hasty retreat, turning around and walking down another street. This street was quite poorly lit at the start, and degenerated to near darkness by the middle. One thing I have noticed about manholes in Russia is that they very rarely are covered. You can obviously see where I am going with this. Luckily for me there was a piece of metal about a foot from the surface that my foot landed on, so I didn't fall down the hole, but it was enough to send me sprawling onto the road cutting my hands. Of course the first thing I did was look around to see if anyone saw me. Luckily the people drinking in the park opposite hadn't noticed.

I found the hotel I was looking for, and it was of very dubious quality. There was a casino style thing on the ground floor and shifty looking people in the lobby. I managed to make myself understood and get a room. The door of the room didn't lock and there didn't seem to be a toilet nor shower on the entire level. Not that I looked around that much, I wedged a chair under the door handle and went to sleep.

The next day I booked a ticket to Irkutsk that left on the evening train, left my luggage at the station and went to explore the town. First of all I checked out the worlds largest head of Lenin, and it was definitely very large. It was kind of bizarre seeing people going about their daily business with such a monolith mere meters away. There were some beautiful wood lace houses, and as I was walking around the backstreets checking them out I was approached by an interesting looking character. He was wearing skin tight leather pants, a leather jacket, and had black slicked back hair. He could speak a little English and I could speak a little Russian, however the combined conversation was still quite stunted. His name was as 'Slava', however his friends (and he himself) called him 'Crazy Slava'. Turns out he was quite into rock and roll, and I imagine he saw me as a fellow 80's hair rocker. We went to a bar, bought some beers and had a conversation about rock which went along these lines "You know Jimmy Hendrix?", "Yes", "Good or Bad?", "Good" , "Yeah!" Slava makes air guitar sounds and motions", "You know Axle Rose?" etc...

After a while at the bar, we went and picked up his Mongolian mate named Balor. We went to Slava's place, drank Armenian Cognac and watched an old VHS tape of a guns and roses concert. After much air guitar and Cognac Slava passed out and Balor and I went to meet a friend of his. I forget Balor's friends name, but both of them were very helpful and interesting. They made it their mission to help me accomplish all of the errands in needed to do before getting on the train, they showed me to an Internet cafe, tried to track down a payphone that was working and wrote me a list of Russian words they thought I needed to know (including cure, hospital, husband, kitchen, police and skin head. I don't exactly know why these words made it on to the list). We bought some beers and they took me to the train station and saw me off. Nice guys.

Phantasms

In the theme of the title of this blog, I will be occasionally relating random images and events I have jotted down in a notebook.

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Boarding the train in Beijing early in the morning, the station smelt of coal and axel grease, as it should.

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Visibility is low leaving Beijing. Stark winter trees are but black outlines against the smog grey world.

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We passed a small cemetery. A score of mounds in an overgrown field, each with a grey stone obelisk indicating ownership. The trees surrounding the graveyard are bare and the ground is barren.

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In a jeep in the middle of the Mongolian steppe. It is dead flat in every direction. There is not a road, person nor structure in sight. Suddenly there is the familiar sound of a Nokia ringtone, somehow our driver has mobile reception.

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Our jeep driver Gamba was a captain in the Mongolian army. He is as cool as ice in his black beret. He says he doesn't speak English and I have had limited success communicating with him in Russian. I suspect he understands much more than he lets on, as he occasionally laughs at jokes told in English.

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The toilet on the train opens straight onto the tracks. An blast of ice and snow rushes up and in as the sleepers fly past below.

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Arrived in Ulaan-Baatar. Quite cold. Too cold for pen. Should have brought pencil. (Written in patchy ink)

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Siberia is full of wood and snow.

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Old wooden houses with brightly painted blue and white windows.

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Another cemetery. Another rubbish dump. Rows of silos. A woman with dyed red hair and striking blue eyes. Log trucks lining up at level crossing. A man and child pick their way through the mud and snow.

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Many bridges in Siberia have guard posts with barbed wire and dogs at either end.