Altai Summer Tour 2007

Altai Goddess Belukha

We spent June 26 to July 12, 2007 traveling around in the Altai Mountains. This was the 4^th Altai expedition for Elena Loboda and the 1^st for me.

The Ak-kem valley near Mt. Belukha is a magical place with an amazing energy. When she was describing this place to me, Lena promised I would absorb enough energy for a year just from the three weeks we would spend near Belukha on our trip. It has already been two months since I returned from Altai, and since then my energy has grown to the next level. In these two months I accomplished 3 weekend meditation retreats, a 3-day dark retreat, and 9 days of fasting. I also started taking a Coach certification course and finished this site  all while working full-time !

Famous Tibetologist Yuri Roerich wrote that one of the gates to the legendary land of Shambhala was located near Mt Belukha. The legends name Mt Belukha as one of the main Places of Power on Earth. This place has a unique gift to restore and purify the human spirit, elevating it. The Mountain is considered to be a living being, a Goddess. For this reason, many well-known travelers, and religious teachers from Tibet, Mongolia and China are drawn to this place. The locals consider this mountain to be holy, and do not approach it as closely as do the tourists and climbers.

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Horse trip to Belukha

It took us 3 days on horseback to get from the Village of Tungur to the Ak-kem valley near Belukha, and 2 days to get back. The trip on horseback turned out to be not so hard, and interesting. When you are mounted, you sit quite high and can enjoy the view.  The horses we had were calm and well-trained. However, they were not very eager to work and it took some effort to make them go at a decent speed. For this, you need to establish a real connection with this mighty animal. The horse should feel that you are in charge. During this trip I felt that I was living my childhood stories about cowboys and novels by Jules Verne. On the ride back I already felt like an experienced rider, mostly because my old, tired horse suddenly came alive. It turned out that Serko was very smart and was much more eager to go toward home that away. I also happily found out that I didn’t need to actually hit him to make him go faster like our guide told us. Just the shadow of the whip was enough to get the message across, like in the old Buddhist parable:

A philosopher once visited Buddha and asked him: "Without words, without the wordless, will you tell me the truth?" Buddha kept silence. After a while the philosopher rose up gently, made a solemn bow and thanked Buddha saying: "With your loving kindness, I have cleared away all my delusions and entered the true path." When the philosopher had left, Ananda, a senior disciple of Buddha, enquired: "O, Blessed one, what hath this philosopher attained?" Buddha replied: "A good horse runs even at the shadow of the whip!"

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Northern Summer Flowers and Herbs

The Northern Summer is amazingly powerful because Nature saves its strength for ten months, and puts in all its efforts to create two months of mighty blooming. The number of flowers there is incredible – everywhere where we hiked we saw fields of different flowers around us. We collected some of them for herbal tea. I brought back with me Echinacea, black mountain currant, golden root, and other herbs. Many of the herbs and flowers that grow wild there are good for tea and salads. Also, there are no poisoned mushrooms in Altai – any mushroom we found was edible and added a perfect flavor to our meals.

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Tungur - the Frontier of Civilization

We started our horse trip to Belukha in Tungur – a small village near the rapid Katun River. Most of the people in this village are Altai natives. Altai natives are handsome and calm people deeply connected to Nature. For thousands of years they were hunters and herders. Their religion was, and still is Siberian shamanism, despite their having been converted to Christianity. Many Altai locals are in the tourist business now, they work as small guest-house owners and horse guides. If they speak with you as a stranger, they will express the viewpoints of modern western people, but if you make friends with them and spend enough time near the fire telling stories, you’ll see that their views are full of magic. Their stories are full of tales about mystical shaman powers that they encounter in their everyday lives.Another point of interest in Tungur is the tomb of Peter Suhov – the original person behind the hero of the cult Russian movie ‘White Desert Sun” (Beloe Solntse Pustini)

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Chuiskiy Tract (Chuiskiy Highway)

When we got to Barnaul I had a moment of deja-vu, as if I stumbled into a Communist city from my childhood. If Moscow and St Petersburg are turning more and more into modern European cities, then here in Siberia not many things have changed.

Most of the ten hours from Barnaul to Tungur we spent in a bus, traveling on the Chuiskiy Tract – this road was build in the 18th century. It was used by Russians who explored Altai and traded with China. A large part of the road was built in the 20th century by Stalin’s concentration camp prisoners.

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