RAMAYANA TATTOOS

Photo © David Gilkey- Courtesy NPR

I rarely post on Russia!

On the map that shows where The Travel Photographer blog readership comes from, every continent is dotted with thousands of dots of where the daily hits originate...the least (after sub Saharan Africa) dotted  area is Russia. So perhaps this post will redress the situation.

"Six thousand miles. Seven time zones. And endless cups of hot tea."

National Public Radio's David Greene along with producer Laura Krantz and photographer David Gilkey boarded the Trans-Siberian Railway in Moscow and took two weeks to make their way to the Pacific Ocean port city of Vladivostok, and produced this impressive Russia By Rail series.

The NPR series tells us that it's one of the world's longest train trips, and passes through one of the world's largest forests and runs along the shoreline of the world's largest freshwater lake, Lake Baikal, which holds nearly 20 percent of the world's fresh water.

Interestingly, Gilkey says that their gear included all sorts of recorders, microphones, high-end digital cameras and an iPhone 4. It appears the iPhone was essential because it could be used more easily than regular cameras that are viewed with some suspicion by some Russians. Many of the images in the galleries were made with the iPhone.

Equally interestingly, Gilkey also used new instant film material for the classic Polaroid cameras; results of which can be viewed in the Freeze Frame section of the series. Very atmospheric old timey images.

Photo © Evgenia Arbugaeva-All Rights Reserved

I think featuring Evgenia Arbugaeva's photo essay Following The Reindeer is timely in view of the season where the children in us perhaps long to see them in the sky being led by a jolly man dressed in red with a white beard...but these reindeers are real, and live in the Republic of Yakutia...not in the North Pole.

Yakutia is located in eastern Siberia and stretches to the Henrietta Islands in the far north and is framed by the Laptev and Eastern Siberian Seas of the Arctic Ocean. It's a region with considerable raw materials. It large reserves of oil, gas, coal, diamonds, gold, and silver. The majority of all Russian diamonds are mined there, accounting for almost a quarter of the world's diamond production.

Evgenia Arbugaeva is of Yakutia, and works as a freelance photographer between Russia and New York. She documented the reindeer herders/breeders of the region, who are the Even, the Evenk, the Yukagir, the Chukchi and the Dolgan.