Usually, it is foreigners who jump into the deepest lake in the world in winter. But with many borders closed, the Russians are arriving en masse to make TikTok videos and take photos from Instagram.
IN LAKE BAIKAL, Russia – She drove 2,000 miles at this point: hanging the sunroof of her white Lexus SUV that shone in the blinding sun, face to the smartphone’s selfie camera, bass pounding, tires singing, cutting donuts over the dark blue , ice with white veins.
“It’s for Instagram and TikTok,” said Gulnara Mikhailova, who drove two days and two nights to reach Lake Baikal with four friends from the remote Siberian city of Yakutsk.
It was about zero degrees Fahrenheit when Mikhailova, who works in the real estate market, put on a bathing suit, climbed on the roof of his car and, reclining, posed for pictures.
This is winter in the world’s deepest lake, 2021 Pandemic Edition.
Tour guides are calling it the Russian Season. Usually it is foreigners – many from neighboring China – who migrate to Lake Baikal in Siberia at this time of year to skate, cycle, hike, run, drive, hover and ski on an expanse of ice and snow, while the Russians escape the cold to Turkey or Thailand.
But Russia’s borders are still closed because of the pandemic, and to the surprise of locals, crowds of Russian tourists have swapped tropical beaches for the icy shores of Baikal.
“This season is like no other – no one expected there to be so much movement, such a tourist boom,” said Yulia Mushinskaya, director of the history museum on the popular Baikal island of Olkhon.
People who work with tourists, she said, “are just in shock.”
If you take a moment of stillness in the lake in the shape of a half moon, 400 miles long and 1.6 km deep, the attack on the senses will be supernatural. You are on a meter of ice so solid that it is safely crossed by heavy trucks, but you feel fragile, fleeting and small.
The silence around you is interrupted every few seconds by the crack below – groans, bangs and strange techno-music sounds. Look down and the imperfections of the transparent ice emerge as clear, sparkling curtains.
However, stillness is difficult to achieve.
Although Western governments have discouraged travel during the pandemic, in Russia, as is often the case, things are different. The Kremlin has turned coronavirus-related border closures into an opportunity to make the Russians – who have spent the past 30 years exploring the world beyond the ancient Iron Curtain – stay at home.
A state-funded program started last August offers a $ 270 refund on domestic leisure travel, including flights and hotel stays. It is an example of how Russia, which had one of the highest coronavirus mortality rates in the world last year, has often prioritized the economy over public health during the pandemic.
“Our people are used to traveling abroad to a significant degree,” said President Vladimir V. Putin in December. “The development of domestic tourism is no less important.”
In the past few months, we have seen a monumental crowd of tourists on the beaches of the Black Sea and in the ski resorts of the Caucasus. This winter, during what some call the “holiday of the genre” travel period around the Day of the Defender of the Fatherland on February 23 (when Russia celebrates men) and March 8 (International Women’s Day), the Lake Baikal was the place to be.
It is a tourism distillation in the Instagram era.
Some visitors bring their own smartphone tripods, jumping up and down repeatedly to get a perfect picture of themselves in the air in front of an ice wall. Others fly drones or drop brightly colored smoke bombs.
At sunset recently, a line of tourists was lying on their stomachs on the frozen lake inside a natural grotto on the coastal cliffs, taking pictures of the glittering icicles of roses hanging from the ceiling.
“Get out!” some shouted when another group arrived. “Take a walk, all of you! You are blocking the sun! “
“Social media has led to all of this,” said cave guide Elvira Dorzhiyeva. “There are these important places, and it’s like – ‘All I care about is that I want what I saw online.’”
The most requested photos involve transparent ice, so some guides carry brushes to sweep the snow away.
Nikita Bencharov, who learned English by competing in international table tennis tournaments in the Soviet era, runs a large hotel complex in Olkhon and estimates that, in a normal year, more than 70% of winter visitors are foreigners.
This year, almost all of his guests are Russians, which presents a certain problem. Russians who spend their holidays abroad are used to cheap and comfortable accommodation, difficult to find in the confines of their own country. At Olkhon hotels this season, unpretentious double rooms cost up to $ 200 a night; in some of the cafes, the bathrooms are outside unheated bathrooms.
“Foreigners are already a little bit prepared and thank God that there is a normal bed here, at least, and because they are not sleeping in a bearskin,” said Bencharov. “They understand better than the Russians where they are traveling to and why.”
Many operators targeting foreign tourists have struggled to adjust. In Olkhon, the former Chinese restaurant now serves borscht.
At the northern tip of the island, where orange cliffs rise over a bluish-white maze of ice formations, fleets of tour vans deposit hundreds of people to slide and climb and then sip fish soup heated by fires placed directly on the ice.
A Moscow couple, two engineers in their 30s, said they were visiting Siberia for the first time. One said he was touched by the landscape, but shocked by the region’s poverty and felt sorry for the people and how they should live.
About 80 kilometers away, in a fishing camp on the other side of the lake, three men huddled in a metal hut on the ice, the indoor air impregnated with the smell of cured fish, damp bedding and pine nut moonlight. a plastic bottle on the floor. Two of the men, firefighters, said they earned about $ 300 a month and took several weeks off in the fall to supplement their income by harvesting pine nuts in the forest.
“We do the bare minimum and complain and complain – and that’s it,” said one of the firefighters, Andrei, 39. “And, what, we heard Putin on TV …”
He let his voice trail away, with a nervous laugh. He declined to give his surname, concerned about retaliation in his public office.
Baikal’s alien landscape offers an escape from adversity and crisis – temporary and, perhaps, misleading. Coronavirus, for example, does not seem to exist, without a mask in sight for visitors carrying vans and restaurants. Their dismissive attitude reflected an independent survey this month, which found that less than half of Russians were concerned about getting the virus and that only 30% were interested in receiving the Russian coronavirus vaccine.
“It’s psychosis,” said a forest guard, Elena Zelenkina, of the global fear of the virus as she served tea and homemade donuts in a gift shop near hot springs on the lake’s quieter east coast.
A group of music aficionados in the nearby city of Irkutsk even held their annual indoor winter music festival. One of the spectators, Artyom Nazarov, was from Belarus – one of the few countries whose citizens can now easily enter Russia.
Belarus, like Russia, has been devastated by anti-government protests. But, like Putin, Belarusian President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko stood his ground, deploying a show of overwhelming strength to contain the unrest. Nazarov said he supported the protesters, but since it appeared that their victory was neither imminent nor guaranteed, he was moving on.
He had spent an exciting week walking and skating in Olkhon. He was looking forward to more outdoor tourism, on the Kamchatka peninsula, Russia, or Iceland, if the borders open up.
“We all have our dreams and our goals that we want to achieve,” said Mr. Nazarov. “Life goes on.”
Oleg Matsnev contributed research from Moscow.