Moscow to Petropavlovsk

Tony had noticed that on our flights to Patropavlovsk we were all entitled to a 40kg baggage allowance. What a pleasant surprise. It was only when we arrived at the airport that we saw why. With our snowboard bags and gear, when compared to our fellow passengers, we were still relatively light packers.

I think our fellow passengers broadly fit into three categories: There were fellow skiers and snowboarders, there were Russians taking every conceivable luxury and household good presumably not available in Kamchatka, and lastly there were American and German hunters packing some serious heat!

It turns out that Kamchatka also attracts a lot of hunting tourism. I am a little uncomfortable with sharing the beautiful surrounds and natural beauty of Kamchatka with hunters. I do not object to hunting per se. I have shot at a few ducks on a friends farm before. Had we been successful we would have taken them home to his mother and they would have been lunch. I however do draw the line somewhere. It just doesn't seem right to me to travel half way across the world to a place that has less stringent regulations than your own countries to go out and shoot bears whilst they are still yawning and stretching out after having just woken up from their winter hibernation. What chance do they have when they still have sleep in their eyes? I just don't get trophy hunting.

We all managed to land the front row of economy which is great if you can stretch your legs out into the aisle. If like me, you are sandwiched in the middle, you have a X hour flight without straightening your legs. I guess it could have been worse. I could have been allergic to pollen and been sandwiched next to a flower weilding mamuschka like Colleen and Andrew

The person sitting next to me was Marja Persson who it turned out that was heading out to join Patrik Linqvist and others in Kamchatka for a shoot and would be flying in the same helicopter as us.

I had some sleeping tablets shortly after take off (the guys behind us were using vodka instead) and managed a few fitful burst of sleep before being woken 7 hours into our 9 hour journey for breakfast, my 9th airline meal in 5 days (was it breakfast?). I still wasn't quite with it when we touched down to an overcast Petropavlovsk at about 10 am local time.

It was a very uneventful flight really. I remember it being dark only very briefly. In future I would try to get a window seat so that I could take a look at the volcanoes poking through the clouds in event of bad weather. I also would ask not to be woken for food. It seems you have no choice.

Nothing strange here

This is my response to a post I saw on the following blog: Even normal recreation is getting weird

"Talk about people getting too jaded and needing extreme excitement to prevail over boredom!!

Talk about being out of your freaking mind!"

I don't see anything unusual with snowboarding or skiing on volcanoes. I just see them as a different type of mountain, that might results is some interesting terrain. I think that Kamchatka is likely to be a lot more mellow than Krasnaya Polyana in the Caucuses or Gulmarg in the Pir Pinjal range, both being places I benchmark my trips against. I certainly don't consider riding a volcano to be extreme, crazy, or fringe. I think spending your waking hours working to make other people's dreams come true rather than your own is crazy.

In fact, judging by most people's actions, I think they are fine with snowboarding or skiing volcanoes, even if they haven't ever consciously thought about it. Mammoth, amongst others, is actually a volcano, a fact that often escapes a lot of people.

For me I simply see Kamchatka as an exotic and vast snowboarding destination (larger than France, Belgium and Luxembourg combined), with a long winter, runs filled with endless powder turns, and hopefully enough variation to be technically challenging. Unlike skiers, I can't simply satisfy myself with nice symmetrical zigzag's down the mountain. Bring on hips, lips, drops and gullies! I don't expect to find many trees but then we can't have it all.

There is one volcano that I do want to snowboard that I do think does fall into the crazy, fringe, extreme category. Its Cotopaxi in Ecuador! We have a history. About 4 year ago, with only 100 metres left to climb largest active volcano in the world (according to the 2002 CIA World factbook), my guide decided that the risk of avalanche was too severe and turned me back. I have sworn to go back and conquer that baby, and when I do, I might consider strapping a board to my pack and snowboarding down to declare victory on the sleeping icy beast that will one day kill thousands.

Each to their own really, but I certainly don't see anything too extreme about heliboarding in Kamchatka. What is perhaps extreme is how far away it is from everywhere, including most people's consciousness.