T A B L E_T A L K What's the weirdest thing you've ever encountered in your travels? One-up fellow pilgrims in Table Talk. R E C E N T L Y The Aussie Way of Wanderlust By Tony Wheeler Lonely Planet founder: Why Aussies are traveling fools (11/12/97) Road Warrior Roger Black Tips and tales from a globe-trotting print and Web designer (11/11/97) Descending the Congo By Jeffrey Tayler He wanted to canoe the Congo, but didn't count on the storms, mosquitoes -- and cannibals (11/10/97) Esther Dyson, road warrior By Don George The Net's most frequent flyer shares her travel secrets (11/06/97) Eating around in Boston By Larry Smith The way to the heart of Boston is through its stomach (11/06/97) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Your virtual travel agency - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - A full list of all Wanderlust articles		forbidden russia______ | E X C E R P T | Open Lands: Travels Through Russia's Once Forbidden Places By Mark Taplin 376 pages, Nonfiction Steerforth Press + + + + + + + + In 1992, Russia opened up vast areas of land previously forbidden to travelers. In "Open Lands: Travels Through Russia's Once Forbidden Places," writer Mark Taplin records his travels through these areas, comparing them with his past experiences in closed Russia, and meshing his observations with Russia's tumultuous history of the past century. The following excerpt describes Taplin's adventures as he first wanders off Russia's main roads to visit parts of the country altered by time and history, yet remarkably -- and poignantly -- impervious to change. + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + I awoke in Velsk the next morning with a new plan. A mist redolent of mown hay and clover hid the Vaga River and the cottages along its bank. I strolled down the dirt road leading to the river's edge, absorbed in the rustlings of an eight-hundred-year-old hamlet rousing itself for another summer day: the raspy melody of a babushka singing to herself in the kitchen; the wheezy, percussive enthusiasm of the village pump being cranked over and over; the honky-tonk clatter of geese impatient to be fed. Up above the fast-dissipating fog, the still, steady solstice sky was cloudless, suffused with a light as benign as a saint's visage. Why not improvise a bit, I thought? According to my atlas, there was another route I could follow that ran parallel to the main highway. When I reached the intersection outside of Velsk, I swung the Niva away from my all-Soviet route, into country I wanted to sample rather than skirt. Never before in Russia had I experienced this freedom to roam, to turn down a road with careless rather than carefully studied intentions. I had no appointments to keep. Nor was there anyone shadowing me, taking careful note of where I chose to stop and start. Here in the backwoods of the Arkhangelsk oblast, the forlorn scars of the Soviet era were few and far between. Seventy-five turbulent years had glided by, during which these villages barely caught the eye of the notoriously intrusive Communist Party of the Soviet Union. There were no lamentably ruined factories, no maudlin Lenin statues, no long-idle construction sites littered with broken pipes and cracked cinder block. Where there was decay, it was of a graceful, nostalgic sort, like that of a barn bent over with advancing years: the pardonable type of rural disrepair that, in whatever country, has existed in the past, exists today, and will always exist in the future. Brightly painted cottages lined the road, along with two-story log houses weathered to the color of charcoal. Fathers split firewood, while sons flew handmade kites; mothers and daughters, their faces wrapped in flowered head scarves, strolled hand in hand. Goats and cows, dogs and cats, populated every yard, every field. Here was the preindustrial, premodern Russia that, however diminished, still filled the soul of this great country with its unenlightened, unromantic, undemocratic -- yet undeniably rich and bountiful -- outlook. Even a mere passerby could feel the ancient rhythm of these places: a song of simple means, modest horizons, and a basso profundo inertia that was as immutable as a boulder at the bottom of a river. It was a folk theme made up in equal parts of exuberance, fatalism, equivocation, anarchy. Village emotions might run high over where a cow was pastured, or how the communal vegetable plots were distributed. Yet no one was in a hurry to raise their voice, to pound a table, to make speeches over something as inherently ephemeral as politics. Therein lay the reason the Russian peasant so frustrated anyone harboring the mad ambition of remaking Russian society, whether misguided Bolshevik or naive promoter of Western capitalism. This Russia was virtually impervious to revolution; it could be ravished and abused, but not remade. Perhaps the roads were just another reflection of this convoluted mental topography. The pavement shifted from asphalt to concrete, from concrete to hard gravel, then back to asphalt. A few kilometers later, at a clearing in the forest adorned by a long-abandoned rusty steamroller, the highway leapt back down the evolutionary scale to unimproved mud. A cut straight ahead through the trees hinted at wilted human ambition, but otherwise all signs of twentieth-century engineering had petered out. The way, black and glistening, slipped off the manmade grade toward a marshy flat. Within minutes the Niva was drenched in ooze, not just across the grill and along the doors but all the way up and over its rooftop. Plowing blindly through mudholes the length of bowling alleys, I was never entirely certain I would emerge back into the sunlight at the other end. The faster I accelerated into the liquid stretches, the more violently the jeep was thrown about, with each rough spot spawning its own hurricane of muck and hurtling chassis. I forged ahead like this for some time before checking the odometer. I had managed a mere fifteen kilometers. On a nearby rise, I spotted a dilapidated wooden church. I drove up to it and turned off the ignition, intending to give myself and my machine a rest while I sized up the situation. Most of the wooden churches built before the revolution have been lost. Except for a handful that have been moved to museums, the majority succumbed over the years to a combination of neglect, fire and -- most tragically -- willful destruction. Here, on this knoll, I had happened upon one of the few survivors. NEXT+PAGE: Life before and after the Bolsheviks