Kamchatka — the place I’ll never visit
Well, highly unlikely. During my years in Russia, I made little effort to travel to far places. I didn’t even visit Saint Petersburg, the second biggest city, until my late 20s. The farthest east I traveled was the city of Barnaul, in Western Siberia. It was a very brief work trip when I was doing due diligence on a regional retail company. I am hesitant to generalize, but if you’re a Moscovite, which I am, you rarely get out of the world of the capital unless you travel for work.
I’ve not been back to Russia since I left in 2013, and given the events of recent years, the chances of or the interest in visiting are extremely slim. The same goes for my kids — maybe, in the far future, when they are adults and Russia feels like a safe environment, they will travel.
The catalyst for this story was, however, a message from my oldest son:
The incident he refers to is the mysterious death of hikers in 1959 in the Ural Mountains:
