Alex and Christina's honey moon
Russia - Siberia - The Altay
24th August 2004 to 12th
September 2004
Day 13: After our visit to the market, we travelled back along the Chuisky highway through the mountain steppe to Balyktuyul’ village.
Travelling along the Chuisky highway on 05/09/04
We stopped near the Uzunkel’ lake as we crossed
the mountain pass on our way towards Ulagan village.
We
were able to see the Ak-Tru glacier we had been on only a few days before, it
was now about 200km away, but the air is so clear that it looked as though we
could reach out and touch it. The nature and wilderness of this district has a
primordial beauty. In Ulagan village, we stopped for lunch and visited a small
museum devoted to the Telengites, natives of this district and fourth generation
Christians. We saw many Altaian and Pazyryk artefacts.
We were greatly impressed by a 3.5m tall carriage that the archaeologists had removed from a Pazyryk burial mound when excavations were started in the 1940-s. The carriage we saw was a reconstruction, the original is now in the Hermitage in St Petersburg. We went on to visit the Pazyryk burial mounds before camping for the night.
At a Pazyryk grave on 06/09/04
Numerous articles made of wood and leather, woollen and silk clothes, fur dresses and even embalmed bodies of buried people were found in the frozen compartments. Especially impressive are the wooden adornments made in a so-called Altaian animal style. Now most of these findings can be found in the museums of St. Petersburg, Gorno-Altaisk and other cities.