Hospitality as it is or the January Teletskoye Lake invasion

27 января 2012 года

 
January of the current year at Yailu - the central manor of the Altaiskiy Biosphere Reserve - kept the locals and the Reserve’s staff rather busy: the number of those willing to celebrate the New Year, Christmas and the Feast of the Epiphany and bathe in the sacred Altyn Kol waters has significantly grown.

Photographers from Krasnoyarsk willing to make the rare pictures of ice-free Teletskoye Lake, extreme divers yearning to study the winter depths of the lake together with their teenage children, a joyous singing team of the Russian Home of Folk Traditions, instructors of The Young Seamen Club – Nord Ost (North-East) – from Novosibirsk science campus coming to establish contacts in anticipation of Reserve’s anniversary celebrations and to recharge their creative potential, and, finally, the team of veterans of Epiphany bathing in sacred Teletskoye waters from Barnaul – all of them got their share of attention and hospitality. Favorable snowless conditions made it possible for the Reserve’s staff to fulfill an extended excursion program for the guests of the central manor, which included, apart from the traditional ascent to the sightseeing platform – Vas’kina Mountain, walks in the winter apple orchard accompanied by lectures and stories from the history of navigation and meteorological observation at Lake Teletskoye, first pathfinders in this area and the history of the orchard itself. The guests also paid the first-ever visit to the Pokemon Cave - a small open-ended cavern the walk through which, as claimed by psychotherapists, partially alleviates birth trauma effects.

The traditional Fire of Evening Confessions on the shore of the Teletskoye Lake also welcomed the guests, with its sparks quietly and steadily streaming into the mighty ocean of the Milky Way…

Time flew by very quickly. Soon Yailu’s happy guests left, promising to come back to listen to the wind playing with the dwarf-pine crowns and the magic murmur of the waves on the shore pebbles.

P.S. Making fires in Yailu settlement – the central manor of the Altaiskiy Biosphere Reserve – is forbidden except for specially designated sites.




Yevgeniy Veselovskiy