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Featured Categories : Travel & Holiday : Countries & Regions : Europe : Russia : Siberia

• In Siberia

  Colin Thubron

  
  At 58, Thubron had already lived 10 years longer than the average Siberian when he made his 15,000 mile trip and was as much a novelty to locals as they were to him. Until 1991, foreigners were only allowed along the Trans-Siberian railway. Now all is open, as Thubron writes: "The exhilaration of freedom never quite left me." In In Siberia he searches for the "core of Siberia"--a difficult quest in a land mass larger than the USA and Europe combined.

  Siberia is Russia's wild east--pillaged by the Cossacks for furs, later populated by exiles and prisoners, who diluted the native culture of hunters and Mongol-Turkish nomadic tribes. Thubron travels from unknown town to unknown town, hunting at sunset for shelter. Some of it is as bad as you would fear--endless, uninhabitable, treeless tundra, frozen solid eight months a year. There are ghostly gulag towns like Vorkuta with its smoke stacks, "black detritus", and death camps where prisoners worked 12 hours a day, living in minus 40 until death (usually two weeks).He finds grim broken-down people living only for vodka, freedom having escaped them again. "Scarce jobs and high prices were the new slave masters."

  At other times In Siberia is more surprising--the rebirth of Christianity and eager building of monasteries; Mongol shamans; the 2,500,000- year-old mummified remains of a princess; sweaty 85 degree temperatures; Akademogorodok, an abandoned science city where a lone professor experiments with cosmic consciousness.

  Like many of the people he meets, Thubron's book is weighed down by history, but it does succeed in quenching the curiosity about that great blank in the Atlas. --Sarah Champion

  
   

• Reindeer People: Living with Animals and Spirits in Siberia

  Piers Vitebsky

  
  
   

• Barbed Wire & Babushkas: A River Odyssey Across Siberia

  Paul Grogan

  
  
   

• Trans-Siberian Railway: A Classic Overland Route (Lonely Planet Classic Overland Routes)

  Simon Richmond, Mara Vorhees

  
  
   

• Through Siberia by Accident: A Small Slice of Autobiography

  Dervla Murphy

  
  
   

• Trans-Siberian Handbook (Trailblazeer)

  Bryn Thomas

  
  
   

• Trans-Siberia: Inside the Grey Area (Summersdale travel)

  Paddy Linehan

  
  
   

• Roaming Russia: An Adventurer's Guide to Off the Beaten Track Russia and Siberia

  Jessica Jacobson

  
  
   

• River of White Nights

  Jeffrey Tayler

  
  
   

• Off the Rails: Moscow to Beijing on Recumbent Bikes

  Tim Cope, Chris Hatherly

  
  
   

• The Tunguska Fireball: Solving One of the Great Mysteries of the 20th Century

  Surendra Verma

  
  
   

• Beyond Siberia

  Christina Dodwell

  
  
   

• Siberian BAM Guide - rail, rivers, and road: The Second Trans-Siberian Railway (Trailblazer)

  Nicholas Zvegintzov, Athol Yates

  
  
   

• The Trans-Siberian Railway: A Traveller's Anthology

  Deborah Manley

  
  
   

• Reindeer People: Living with Animals and Spirits in Siberia

  Piers Vitebsky

  
  
   

• Off the Map: Bicycling Across Siberia

  Mark Jenkins

  
  
   

• Beyond Siberia

  Christina Dodwell

  
  
   

• In Siberia

  Colin Thubron

  
  At 58, Thubron had already lived 10 years longer than the average Siberian when he made his 15,000 mile trip and was as much a novelty to locals as they were to him. Until 1991, foreigners were only allowed along the Trans-Siberian railway. Now all is open, as Thubron writes: "The exhilaration of freedom never quite left me." In In Siberia he searches for the "core of Siberia"--a difficult quest in a land mass larger than the USA and Europe combined.

  Siberia is Russia's wild east--pillaged by the Cossacks for furs, later populated by exiles and prisoners, who diluted the native culture of hunters and Mongol-Turkish nomadic tribes. Thubron travels from unknown town to unknown town, hunting at sunset for shelter. Some of it is as bad as you would fear--endless, uninhabitable, treeless tundra, frozen solid eight months a year. There are ghostly gulag towns like Vorkuta with its smoke stacks, "black detritus", and death camps where prisoners worked 12 hours a day, living in minus 40 until death (usually two weeks).He finds grim broken-down people living only for vodka, freedom having escaped them again. "Scarce jobs and high prices were the new slave masters."

  At other times In Siberia is more surprising--the rebirth of Christianity and eager building of monasteries; Mongol shamans; the 2,500,000- year-old mummified remains of a princess; sweaty 85 degree temperatures; Akademogorodok, an abandoned science city where a lone professor experiments with cosmic consciousness.

  Like many of the people he meets, Thubron's book is weighed down by history, but it does succeed in quenching the curiosity about that great blank in the Atlas. --Sarah Champion

  
   

• Off the Map: Bicycling Across Siberia

  Mark Jenkins

  
  
   

• Meteorite Hunter: The Search for Siberian Meteorite Craters

  Roy A. Gallant