Brothers on the Bashkaus: A Siberian Paddling Adventure Review

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Brothers on the Bashkaus: A Siberian Paddling Adventure ReviewIt has been a long dry spell for armchair travel books on Russia. Certainly many such works have been published over the past decade. The problem is that most have been eminently missable.
This book breaks that drought.
You do not have to have an interest in kayaking, rafting or Class V rivers to enjoy Buchanan's account of four Americans' and ten Latvians' trip down one of Siberia's wildest rivers. You simply have to love a good travel story: plans gone awry, hilarious characters met on the road, the clash of cultures, nail-biting adventure and the thrill of new experiences.
When the Americans are told to leave behind their custom-crafted raft (instead, they will build rafts from scratch at their drop-in point, with pontoons made from repurposed germ warfare suits - reuse is the Latvian team's specialty)... when they compare their smoothly stylish life jackets with the grotesque but eminently more effective homemade ones of their Latvian hosts (including one made with soccer balls)... when the hapless Americans bristle under the authoritarian food rationing of the mighty Olga... you almost wish you were along for the ride. Almost. For this crew of 14 will descend from high in the Altai mountains through some of the world's most treacherous rapids, on rafts made from trees they cut themselves, living off the land for over a month, paddling with homemade oars and eating all too much salo (pig fat).
This journey is assuredly more enjoyable from an armchair and surely one of the best travel stories out of Russia in many many years. (Reviewed in Russian Life)Brothers on the Bashkaus: A Siberian Paddling Adventure OverviewFrom rafts made from old germ warfare suits to lifejackets stitched together from soccer balls and wine bladders, river running in the former Soviet Union has evolved much like Australian wildlife--completely free of outside influences. Brothers on the Bashkaus follows the exploits of one of the first groups of Westerners to experience this foreign style of rafting on a white-knuckled, 26-day trip down the Bashkaus River, one of the hardest whitewater runs in all Siberia. Armed with little more than former guiding experience and a grant from W. L. Gore and Associates, four Americans stumble into a chance encounter with Latvia's Team Konkas and soon find themselves with a group of complete strangers on one of the wildest rides in the world. Along the way they deal with everything from language barriers and homemade equipment to armed horsemen and rapids lined with memorials to those who perished before them. But more importantly, they discover the bonding process of the river, a medium that dissolves cultural barriers as easily as sediment. They find that the river creates a common bond regardless of race, religion, or nationality--a bond in which a group of strangers truly come together as brothers.

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