Edward Adrian-Vallance

EdVallance

I like traveling and writing. For the last few years I seem to have got stuck exploring the vastness of Russia and the former Soviet Union. I'm not even halfway through it yet.



Travel Blog Posts


Ukraine's diamond-shaped bottom

Published: September 3rd 2012Europe » Ukraine » Krim
EdVallance icon
EdVallance
June 27th 2012

Train stations in former Soviet countries are not the sort of place you would want to subject children to for aтy longer than absolutely essential. Nevertheless, every available inch of seating at Kiev station is taken up by families who, according to tradition, have arrived many hours before their departure time and sit there meekly doing nothing while they await their train. The waiting hall is an enormous, high-ceilinged cavern of a room but only a small proportion of its floor has been installed with seats, which are super-densely packed together and leave those early-arriving families clumped together like a blob on one side while the rest of the room remains empty. Those without sufficient foresight, or who simply cannot be bothered, to arrive hours before their train are left to explore the station’s array of ... read more



EdVallance icon
EdVallance
May 8th 2012

A lonely track winds its way along the Kola Peninsula's Tersky Coast from one log cabin village to the next, its orangey-brown earth taking up the majority of the narrow space between trees and sea. The taiga forest, its floor turned to swamp by the coming spring, ends abruptly on one side while on the other the White Sea, afloat with vast chunks of melting ice, laps the shore and fills the lungs with its fresh, salty breeze. A blazing sun beats down from a clear sky on this May morning, its rays sparkling on the sea's dark blue surface, illuminating the barky browns and mossy greens of the forest nearest to the road while leaving its depths utterly impenetrable to the eye. Half an hour after leaving the village of Varzuga our van stopped. Vasily, ... read more



EdVallance icon
EdVallance
April 30th 2012

The mountainside rumbled under the hooves of 4,000 reindeer. When you put such a huge number of this species together, something very strange but well documented by science happens, and was taking place on a mountain on Arctic Russia’s Kola Peninsula at that moment: the reindeer were galloping around and around in a giant, perfectly-formed ring five hundred meters long and a dozen animals thick all the way around. Over the course of a day this grunting, snorting, mass of constantly circling animals was driven carefully down from the snowy heights, over the short, springy, brown vegetation that covered the boulder-strewn lower slopes and into the tundra and forest below. In this way the indigenous Saami reindeer herders began their Spring migration. I had arrived on Kola a few days previously after a 33-hour train ride ... read more



Secrets from The Edge of the World

Published: April 19th 2012Europe » Russia » Siberia
EdVallance icon
EdVallance
April 14th 2012

The nine families, nine chums and 10,000 reindeer of the second Yar Sale brigade were on their way north, their annual 1200km migration begun after a six-week winter break in the forest tundra of Nadym Region. To a casual observer who somehow stumbled on the nine conical tents amid the flat, treeless, white expanse of the Yamal Peninsula tundra, it would not be immediately obvious that these Nenets nomads were on the move. To a more trained eye, however, signs were everywhere: the dark skin of the herders, deeply bronzed by the sun after 200km traveled by reindeer-drawn sledge from the forest tundra; the reindeer herd, which during the six-week winter break had been allowed to wander up to 20km from the encampment, now milling around in a depression a few hundred metres away, ready to ... read more



Faces of Ukraine

Published: April 17th 2012Europe » Ukraine » Lviv
EdVallance icon
EdVallance
March 18th 2012

From the northernmost limits of the former Soviet Union to the westernmost, from the Siberian Arctic to the tranquil, warm, historical European town of Lviv, was 3.5 days of train travel and a temperature rise of more than 40°C. People came and went, the train's denizens morphing from one sort to another as surely as did the landscape through which we traveled. At Moscow I changed trains, the oil and gas workers returning from months-long stints in the north who had made up the majority of the passengers on the way south now dispersing on various trains to their respective corners of the former USSR. They were replaced by Ukrainians returning home from months-long stints in Moscow who brought with them bags full of chicken, eggs, little boxes of salt, salami, bread, tomatoes, cucumbers and vodka ... read more



Nomads of the Arctic

Published: March 31st 2012Europe » Russia » Siberia
EdVallance icon
EdVallance
March 11th 2012

In the flat, white tundra it was hard to appreciate the vastness of 10,000 reindeer. I stood next to our sledge while grunting, snorting seas of bodies and antlers flowed around me in one direction then another. Dogs kept them moving while a Nenets man on a reindeer-drawn sledge, directing his transport beasts with light blows from a long wooden pole, moved from one part of the herd to another, looking for reindeer ready to be eaten. Once a suitable animal had been found the herders would get that part of the herd moving with the help of dogs. They would then stand still until, catching sight of the animal he wanted amid the rippling, flowing, cascading mass of reindeer, one would lash out with his reindeer-rawhide lasso and send it sailing through the air. More ... read more



EdVallance icon
EdVallance
February 5th 2012

My eyes are frozen shut. I hear only the roar of the snowmobile dragging our sledge across the Gulf of Ob's frozen waters. After traveling for seven hours in -40°C the cold overpowers other sensations so that it is all I feel. Soon we will reach the coast of the Yamal Peninsula but for now we must bear another hour of this burning, soul-crushing cold. I relive the last few days as images dancing through my mind: laughter around the fire in a darkened teepee... and warmth; the rising sun lending its fiery glow to the silver trees around the Nenets nomads' encampment... and warmth; drinking fresh blood from a reindeer carcass... and its warm trickle down my throat. Always these fleeting, ethereal memories of warmth come back as we plough on through the Arctic night. ... read more



Around and about in Arctic Siberia

Published: February 23rd 2012Europe » Russia » Siberia
EdVallance icon
EdVallance
January 26th 2012

The train took us out of Moscow's suburbia with its usual rapidity and into the land of snow-coated wooden cottages, picket fences and endless forest that would greet our every glance through the train window for the next forty eight hours before thinning out into sub-Arctic forest tundra on our journey's third and final day. We passed Rostov Veliky, turrets on the gentle, whitewashed walls of its Kremlin barely visible against the snowy sky. By the time we reached Yaroslavl, a glorious winter sun had emerged to lend a warm, glowing life to the outlandish colours of the cathedral domes amid the city's concrete sprawl. We went to sleep shortly after Vologda and woke up in the bitter cold of Kotlas where we stopped traveling due north on the Moscow - Arkhangelsk line and branched off ... read more



Through the fading autumn forests

Published: October 6th 2011Europe » Russia » Northwest » Karelia
EdVallance icon
EdVallance
October 3rd 2011

The world is changing. The trees of the endless Russian forest, a few weeks ago alive with a million vibrant emerald hues, are now becoming dull. The ominously brooding greys and blacks of the sky, from which just over a month ago the sun beat down on us at over 30°C, do not allow the leaves to show off their potentially glorious array of autumn colours. Instead they are lifeless shells, drab reminders of the coming winter that one by one fall from the trees and drift slowly to rest on the forest floor. The number of dark, bare, skeletal branches is rising, soon to outnumber those laden with the last real colours this world will see for six months. A few droplets of rain trickle down the train window through which I am looking, not ... read more



A Volga little town

Published: September 27th 2011Europe » Russia » Centre
EdVallance icon
EdVallance
September 26th 2011

Bleary-eyed we climbed out of the carriage, down the steps and onto the one lonely platform at Uglich's station. The train we had arrived on stood motionless on the rails, its engines finally silent after a nine-hour chug through the night. The thinnest sliver of a crescent moon hung a few inches above it, lending a purplish light to the just-visible clouds that rippled away in all directions. Small cloudless patches of sky were just beginning to differentiate themselves from the general darkness of the heavens with the very faintest hint of blue, suggesting that somewhere the sun was inching its way up towards the horizon. The last of the passengers had left and a chill autumn wind was blowing down the platform, a precursor to the winter that would soon be upon us. The train's ... read more






Tot: 0.158s; Tpl: 0.01s; cc: 11; qc: 57; dbt: 0.0592s; 1; s:apollo w:www (50.28.60.10); sld: 4; ; mem: 6.7mb