Pics from Russia

I was recently browsing the English Russia website and once again I found some terrific sets of pictures.
If you follow the links you will get to the full sets.

One set is about rafting in Transbaikalia - probably a place where you can experience a real wilderness and solitude. Together with Canada probably one of very few place in the North Hemisphere where you can experience anything like that.
If you go further you get to Kolyma. A place of something even more distant and without any significant presence of people. Yet hearing the name Kolyma one most recall all the stories about Gulag camps which were located there. There must be thousands of deads there. For me personally this thought would be something I couldn't get rid of.

I wonder what is behind these mountains. An experience you cannot imagine in Europe - you can be pretty sure that there are just a few people there. If any.
What you find in Ekibustaz is a totally different piece of thing. But still one which reminds you of how small  man is. And how big things he can create.

Especially when you are on the top of the monster.

And last but not least - guess what is this?

It is a former Command Post of the Missile Divison. I cannot get rid of the absurd feeling - the command centre is designed so to allow its inhabitants to survive nuclear war. The point is - if there was nuclear war did it make any sense to try to survive it? I guess most of the world afterwards would like like this - kind of a post-apocalyptic world without life, without any chance to survive.
Maybe the people would find new places to live in Kolyma or Siberia. (Because, I believe, there were not many targets of American missiles.) But what kind of live it would be is a different question.

Looks rather like a place from a computer game than a real one.

What English Russia brings quite often to me is the experience of something strange, something beyond a normal Central European experience. One cannot protect himself from falling a victim of usuall Russia related cliches about "nas mnogo" and the like but the message is clear - here you can see things which you cannot experience in my little Bohemia... Whether it is good or bad - well, I dont know. The point is that you cannot have one without the other one.