By Will Englund,
Sun reporter:

Anyone who wants to understand Russia, the great northern empire, might as well go to the Far North to find its essence. Jeffrey Tayler did just that, traveling in a two-man rubber boat almost the entire length of Siberia's Lena River. He began in Ust-Kut in the forests near Lake Baikal at the beginning of summer and finished in mid-August in the tundra town of Tiksi on the shores of the Laptev Sea high above the Arctic Circle. If there was a single big theme he drew out of the experience, it has to do with the destitute, waiting-for-something nature of life in the villages of one of the most remote parts of the world.

Eastern Siberia was settled by Evenks, who were pushed north by Yakuts from Mongolia, who were eventually brought into the Russian orbit by Cossacks, followed by czarist prisoners, followed by Stalin's prisoners, followed by the bonus-collecting builders of communism in the era of Nikita Khrushchev. The bonuses are gone, the money is gone, the jobs are gone. The vodka is still there, and the tumbledown houses, and the limitless forests and bracing air and gigantic mosquitoes.

Tayler hired a man named Vadim Alekseyev to be his guide and shipmate, and the two didn't hit it off. Alekseyev is a recognizable type, the bronzed Russian who is thoroughly competent at living in the wild, disdainful of towns and civilization - Soviet, Russian, American or otherwise. He lectures Tayler on the beauty of the North, is irritated that what Tayler mostly wants to do is talk to people they meet along the way, and is exasperated that Tayler is so unredeemable a foreigner. I had a somewhat similar experience several years ago at an Arctic bird sanctuary on the White Sea; my guide, a ranger of sorts for the sanctuary, treated me with the sort of elaborate courtesy and deference that Russians reserve for foreigners whom they deem to be idiots. I was mightily fed up, then we went out in a small boat fishing, and in the space of a few minutes I landed three cod. After that I was happily accepted as one of the guys. (And yes, it was illegal to fish there, but it was a bird sanctuary, not a cod sanctuary, and anyway it made for a delicious lunch.) I kept wishing, reading this book, that Tayler would catch his cod - literally or figuratively - but he never did. I began to sympathize with Alekseyev.

Tayler is a correspondent for The Atlantic who lives in Moscow with his Russian wife, and in truth many of the conversations he has with people along the way are wonderfully illuminating, sometimes quite funny, and often - well, I would say sobering, but that's not really the right word when so much vodka and beer is going down so many hatches. There is little in the villages to do on a summer evening but drink, so Russians drink, and not for merriment.

Tayler shows he can listen, which is a surprisingly rare and valuable trait in a journalist. But can he write? Siberia is an elemental place - of cedar and birch, of log cabins and tart berries and mushrooms and wood smoke, of shamans and windstorms and bad teeth and rotten livers. It's scratching chickens and mangy dogs and mud at the threshold. It demands an earthy vocabulary, and instead Tayler treats us to descriptive passages that employ words like asthenic, oneiric, delectation, Aeolian and estival, and phrases like "permeated my first moments of wakefulness." Can you imagine sharing a boat with this guy for 2,400 miles?

Nearly at the end of the book, though, he has a great line: "Sometimes we have to see things for ourselves." Every roving correspondent and adventurer lives by that line, or should. I wanted to cheer when I saw it. There are better writers than Tayler, but they haven't traveled from one end of the Lena to the other; until they do, I'll take River of No Reprieve.

Originally published July 23, 2006

By By Rolf Pots.
Yahoo! Travel

Though few readers are likely to travel in Tayler's footsteps, his book promises keen fascination for anyone who's interested in far-flung places, and the people who live there. Curious to know more about the deepest reaches of Siberia, I emailed Tayler some questions about his Lena sojourn.

The Lena is one of the longest rivers in the world, yet it has neither the accessibility of the Nile, nor the fabled reputation of the Congo. What inspired you to travel the length of this remote and obscure waterway?

Jeffrey Tayler: I first became enamored of the Lena in 1993, when a truck taking me from Magadan, on the Sea of Okhotsk, to Yakutsk, drove me over it. In winter, temperatures in Siberia drop so low that an eight-foot-thick layer of ice covers the river, ice strong enough to support all manner of traffic, including sixteen-wheelers and landing aircraft. That ice, I never forgot, was as blue as the sky. I spent weeks traversing eastern Siberia then as part of the journey I undertook for my first book, Siberian Dawn, and ever since, I had longed to return.

If the Lena's pristine nature lured me in, the Cossack explorers' use of the river in their reconnoitering of eastern Russia (and their establishment of its borders) hooked me. A trip down the Lena, I figured, would take me through some of the grandest, most historically significant and least-touched scenery on the planet, if scenery shot through with tragedy. The Lena was, during the Stalin decades, the watery trunk route of the world's largest natural prison; barges took prisoners from Ust'-Kut to labor camps on its banks. For countless gulag inmates, the Lena's landscape was the last they'd ever see.

Russians have a reputation for being standoffish, but I noticed that most of the Siberians you met in your book were quite friendly to you as an outsider. Is hospitality a regional virtue?

JT: In Siberia as elsewhere in Russia, there is no culture of obligatory smiling in casual social encounters. Cretinous grins, hearty handshakes, and spurious declarations of well-being play no role in socializing there. If Russians frown on the street or at work, it's because they're not happy; their lives are hard. This may come across to outsiders as unfriendly or standoffish, when in fact it's just plain honest. Conversely, if someone smiles at you, they mean it.

Among Russians, what replaces all the fausse bonhomie we see in the West is a genuine, if low-key, concern for others. Siberians, thanks to their harsh climate, generally try to help one another out, and an outsider (that is, anyone not from Siberia) may be regarded as especially needy. Along the Lena, a foreigner is a rare bird indeed.

The Lena basin is remote, even for Siberia. Is it possible for independent travelers to explore the region — at least between Lake Baikal and Yakutsk? Is Russian fluency a must for travelers in the region?

JT: One can take a ferry during July and August from Ust'Kut to Yakutsk. But note that visitors to Yakutsk now require a special permit. Otherwise, the few roads are frequently impassible owing to mud and ice; the climate and distances are daunting, even dangerous. On the whole, eastern Siberia isn't really for inexperienced travelers.

That said, one can take the train from Moscow (or Beijing) to Lake Baikal (getting off at Irkutsk), and also fly into and out of Yakutsk from Moscow. The incredibly vast expanses in between will probably remain remoter than remote for outsiders, however, unless you build your own boat and hire a guide, as I did.

I don't think most people could travel around the region enjoyably without at least survival Russian and knowledge of the Cyrillic alphabet. If other languages are spoken, they're likely to be Buryat or Yakut.

Lena River aside, first-timers to Siberia invariably visit Irkutsk, the "Paris of Siberia". I visited the city myself a few years ago, and found it fascinating. Besides Irkutsk, what Siberian destinations might be worth a visit for travelers with a limited amount of time in the region?

JT: The other great Siberian cities of yore (Tomsk, Krasnoyarsk, and Omsk) come to mind as the most attractive, and they're also along the main rail line, which makes them convenient, as long as one doesn't mind a three- or four-day train ride from Moscow. Ulan-Ude, which is even farther east, is a stark town amid Mongolian steppes that I found intriguing during my sojourn in 1993; from there you can visit the Buddhist shrine at Datsan. There's no tourist infrastructure set up in these places, but that has to be part of the charm. Few road rubes are likely to get anywhere near eastern Siberia.