“Nyet! The fat frizzy-haired customs wench wrinkled her nose and scowled behind the glass of her Vladivostok airport booth, raising the open passport of photographer Chris Burkard to eye level. “This not good!” she hissed at him, a long red fingernail pointing to the Entry From date on his $236 Russian Federation visa. Apparently the authorities back in America had misprinted the day Burkard was to arrive—technically he wasn’t allowed into the Rossiyskaya Federatsiya for another two days.
Burkard was to be placed on the next flight back to Seoul, South Korea, leaving in 45 minutes. But after a futile two-hour hash with authorities upstairs, someone said, “It is time to go,” and Burkard was pushed outside by three armed airport guards. The rainy sky was a darkening burnt gray, silhouetted with industrial smokestacks, whorls of brown mist, and pristine mountain ranges of the Primorsky Krai. The air was cool and a touch humid, the gale strong from the southeast, a wave-making wind.
“Zis big problem for you,” the tallest guard said as he strong-armed the stout Amerikanski into the small holding cell near the airport, a converted hotel room with no fresh air or door handle but five deadbolts and a skeleton key used by a rude one-eyed bald policeman with teen-style face zits. The cell’s toilet leaked and the cement floor was wet; there were bars on the cracked window and there would be no room service. The linens were stained and stinky. The cop locked the door and walked away.
Eight hours later, around 1 a.m., there came a knock. A guard opened the door and made a spooning pantomime up to his mouth. “Eda?”—food? “Da,” Burkard replied. He’d learned a few Russian words—da meant “yes”—from a friend back home. He’d also spent the past several hours adding $2,000 to his cell phone bill alternating between the U.S. embassy, Korean Airlines, and his frantic wife, who could do nothing from home in California. But finally they would feed him, and the guard banged a plate of tepid gut-jarring stew called Solyanka, a cube of meat, and cold dried cucumbers onto the steel table next to the leaky toilet.
Still the rain fell.
In the afternoon Burkard exited the cell and was sent back to Seoul, where he overnighted at a sauna inside Incheon International Airport, returned to Vladivostok the following day, and concurrently missed the majority of waves of our two-week trip, thanks to a tiny visa-page date mistake.
Better late than never? Nyet!
* * *
“It had always been a city of delay and death, and now it was poverty-stricken as well, distant, out of touch.” —Paul Theroux, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star
Perhaps Vladivostok could look strange in late summer—sunny, warm, windless, welcoming. Yet in February 2007, during his second visit amid wintry slush and soot and long lack of light, the hub of Russia’s Far East turned a dour face to Mr. Theroux, the famous travel writer who had first passed Vladivostok in a train more than 30 years prior. In 2007 the city of 600,000 was still 6,000 miles from Moscow, but it was indeed a different Russia, a detached state, a distant culture that had barred tourists until 1992, the year the Soviet Union collapsed into independent nations, bleeding civil freedom from Cold War communist wounds. Theroux’s second impressions, however, were not edifying.
For us, amid this New Russia, with the world’s biggest country enjoying the liberalizing reforms of ex-Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika (“reorganization”) and glasnost (“openness”), Vladivostok looked as bright and prosperous as any cosmopolitan city, especially one that closely resembled California’s San Francisco. There were the picturesque buildings, the graffiti, the crisscrossed trolley wires above the streets and loud motorcycles, people shouting, cars honking, wailing car alarms, scent of diesel, bird shit, techno music, dirty crowded public buses, the scenic vistas and leafy parks with their gesticulating statues, the hills and harbor, the cold fog and the breezy surrounding saltwater bay. Geographically Asian, surrounded by China, Japan, and North Korea, Vladivostok showed little Asian influence, though few Asians walked its streets—Russia was vastly Caucasian. But there was plenty of cheap China-made junk for sale, Japan was good at blocking Pacific groundswells, and North Korea was just nasty, a nation of nuclear, the dusky horizon presence on a clear summer day.
Vladivostok was a sublime city you could explore and stay in awhile, necessary considering its outlying coast received swell only a handful of days each year. By global standards, Russia’s Far East was one of the most difficult places to find waves, and we were lucky to even get wet. Our first two (and sans-Burkard) days revealed myriad set-ups and potential galore—north of Vladivostok, the forested Primorsky Krai coast was old and so it was not sheer, its pretty white-sand beaches gently undulating out into flat, refined reefs, pointbreaks, quirky slabs, and chocolate-box beachbreaks. One of these provided an afternoon of offshore peaks, and it was pure chance that we happened to have stopped for lunch there—in 20 minutes the surf went from onshore slop to crisp head-high fun. A fleeting glimpse of what Russia could be but rarely is.
On our third day, at last with Burkard in tow, Californians Josh Mulcoy and Mike Losness studied the blue East Sea at the end of a bumpy dirt road. And they saw nothing. In the lee of Japan, the water had died. Japan’s east coast was windy and pumping, but Internet promises of typhoon swells, southeast gales, rain, and short-period two-meter pulses only amounted to the finest summertime holiday weather Russia could offer: lake-flat, oily glass, 80°F on the sand, topless women in thongs, barbecues, boats, children amok, cold beers for a dollar in the beachfront kiosks. We tanned and drank, partied with Andrey and the boys at the windsurfing school, had an impromtu soccer game (USA vs. Russia; USA won 10 to 9) on a rustic island in the south. It was the way our trip was to unfold.
One morning we drove far to the north, to a spot with excellent swell and wind exposure. En route we were nearly arrested for having breakfast in a military town. “And zere are no waves in zee forecast,” our driver said slowly while we sat in his car at the surfless but scenic cove that took six dirt-road hours to reach. “Zis is bad.” He chuckled. He was serene Valera, Vladivostok’s first surfer, excited to have witnessed Losness and Mulcoy surfing the previous day. They were the first foreigners to ride waves near his hometown. Excited too was blonde Olga, the city’s first wahine, our trusty translator and overall fixer. More than anyone, though, Valera knew his zone’s requirements for rideable swell, and throughout the rest of our trip there were enough false-start days to kill even the strongest optimism. The much-needed typhoon never happened. The wind blew lightly and the sun cooked, and Buoyweather.com lent no hope. When the East Sea went flat, it went f-l-a-t.
Warren Smith, CJ Kanuha, and Sam Hammer arrived later but could not wet a rail. Instead we killed time in Vladivostok, where we could dissolve and lose ourselves among oceans of cheap vodka, cigarettes, hookahs, end-at-8 a.m. nightclubs, new friends, good food and music, and—for the unmarried among us—the world’s most beautiful women. “Let’s drink vodka together” became a theme. Eventually time distorted itself and the city’s soul was unveiled, yet Russia’s subtle intelligence was no match for the stubborn East Sea. It was an act of restraint before the annual winter freeze.
Burkard was shattered. He’d flown all that way, endured detainment and deportation, was emotionally and financially drained, and, with us, he watched nearly a year of planning evaporate into the sunny Siberian sky. Russia was truly a tough place to ingest—huge, stoic, unpredictable. The East Sea’s typhoon season was in premature hibernation, its gates sealed. We surrendered—the Soviet surf trip was done.
