Last fall, a Russian hunter emerged from the forests of southern Sakhalin with a tale of finding English words finger painted into crumbling cement.
Could it be the remains of a long-lost Japanese camp that once held American and British prisoners of war? A search party bounced off in four-wheel-
drive vehicles. A few days later, they returned, empty-handed. Once again, it seemed, Sakhalin’s wilderness had won, swallowing up a prison camp.
Mystery has long shrouded this dagger-shaped island on Russia’s eastern edge. Until 1990, all foreigners were banned from Sakhalin, whose existence was briefly, if starkly, highlighted in 1983, when a Soviet jet took off from a base there and inexplicably shot down a South Korean commercial jet filled with passengers.
Now that the island’s offshore energy riches have attracted the largest foreign investments in Russian history, Sakhalin is open for tourists, and not just the snowboarders who want to shred Bolshevik Mountain, an island draw for young thrill-seekers from around the Pacific Rim.
Displaced Japanese visit
The billions of dollars in oil and gas investments have brought the essentials of tourism to this former prison island, with more to come.
A series of hotel openings planned for 2006 will double hotel rooms, and new direct flights from Seoul and Tokyo are making Sakhalin far more accessible than it was in the czarist and Soviet days.
Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, the capital with a population of 165,000, is a mix of wooden cottages, gloomy Soviet structures and sparkling modern office buildings that greets visitors with a spiffy new international airport terminal. But the island’s wild side has not been washed out – last summer, for instance, a family of brown bears wandered across the tarmac.
I went by ferry – on the Eins Soya, a clean orange-striped boat, which left from Wakkanai, on Japan’s northern tip. Most of my fellow passengers on the 5 1/2-hour trip were elderly Japanese who had lived on southern Sakhalin until August 1945, when it was overrun by Soviet troops. On a cabin wall, a 1932 map of the island showed hundreds of Japanese place names, now largely forgotten.
“I feel it is my destiny to come back,” said Takako Takeuchi, a Tokyo artist. “It is the place where I was born. But it is also the place where my family lost its fortune.”
They come to snowboard
For the 100-mile ferry ride, I paid $185 for a second-class ticket, 10 times the $19 second-class fare a Russian ferry charges for the 160-mile ride from Sakhalin to Vanino Port on the Russian continent. At one point, passengers gathered on a starboard deck to watch dolphins.
Sakhalin tends to attract the adventuresome. They come to Sakhalin to hang glide over abandoned Soviet bases, ride dirt bikes on abandoned logging roads, fish for salmon or snowboard on Bolshevik.
Snowboarding is one of Sakhalin’s most popular attractions. “‘Boarding Bolshie” involves taking a bus from Victory Square in Yuzhno up to Gorniy Vozdukh, or Mountain Air, an area that overlooks the city. A T-bar takes riders up through poplars and Sakhalin firs to a moderately challenging run.
At dawn on my first morning, I opened the curtains of my room at the Gagarin (named after a Soviet cosmonaut) to behold an unexpectedly beautiful view. Rolling out like a green carpet, the landscape progressed from Gagarin Park to miles of thickly forested mountains. The sun pierced a notch between Chekhov and Bolshevik mountains. In October, the foliage turns scarlet.
Later, I asked if the 10-mile dirt road from Gagarin Park to the sea was passable. A local travel agent said the track “had not been maintained properly since the time of the Japanese” and was littered with abandoned Soviet vehicles.
For visitors from staid Japan, Sakhalin’s big attraction is its wildlife, night and day. When the salmon are running, big fat fish can be picked up by hand.
“OK, it’s not sport fishing, it’s like fishing in an aquarium,” said Alexander Dashevsky, who has a license on the Tambovka River.
On the menu: bear
Dashevsky is an English-
speaker whose round, animated Khrushchev visage is a fixture on the expatriate scene in Yuzhno. He owns a Ural truck and maintains a June-to-October fishing camp.
Dashevsky also guides bear hunters. Sakhalin, the size of Maine, has an estimated 3,500 bears, or one for every 150 human inhabitants. Every year, a few bears end up in the pot.
Doctor Zhivago, a wooden cottage restaurant with a moth-
eaten bear pelt for décor, offers for 355 rubles ($12.70) a piping hot bowl of bear stew, seasoned, the waitress said, “with wild berries that bears like.”
On Friday evening, Dashevsky and his friends were drinking at Gagarin’s basement bar. Earlier, I had stopped by and ordered a glass of white wine. The bill was 900 rubles, or $32. I protested.
“This is elite bar,” said a friendly hostess in a low-cut evening dress with an interesting snake tattoo on her leg.
On my return visit, I asked Dashevsky to double-check the prices. Early in the evening, he said, drinks are about $5. And there are no ladies with tattoos.
Night life and a Princess
That Friday night, Dashevsky had to peel off early to prepare for his four-wheel drive down the beach to his fishing camp, so Sergei Vostorgov, his business partner at Sakhalin Travel Group, volunteered to lead a tour of Sakhalin’s urban wildlife. Our ambitious itinerary was to include such night spots as 777, Holiday, Moonlight and Dive. We never got beyond the first stop.
According to my cash register record of the evening, we arrived at 777 at 10:55 p.m., early enough to get a free table in the upper-level bar area. With foreign companies in Sakhalin discouraging dating among employees, Triple Sevens is where the mixing takes place.
“This is like a washing machine – everyone is tumbling around,” said one Russian man.
About 1 a.m., the roar of male accents from Aberdeen to Anchorage lowered a few decibels.
The Princess had walked in. Cellphone pasted to her right ear, she was tall and sleek. Downstairs, the band in T- shirts sang: “I’m getting excited, excited, excited.” But the Princess looked bored.
She wore white skintight hip- hugger pants, made of a nearly translucent material. Above the pants stretched about 18 inches of midriff, to a small bikini top.
The crowd parted. She blew air kisses to friends, pirouetted a few times. Then she marched to the exit, signaling that there was a hotter joint in Sakhalin at 1:15 a.m. Maybe there was.
The details
Getting there: The conventional way to fly to Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk is from Seoul, South Korea, on Asiana Airlines, which now departs three times a week (about $1,140 plus tax, round trip). Round trip from Seoul on Sakhalin Air Trans, which flies twice a week, is cheaper at $525. Tokyo flights on Vladivostok Air leave on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons; coach round trip is about $1,800. American Express in Sakhalin handles bookings for all three airlines; (7-4242) 49-96-45; city.office@amex.ru.