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.