Today we took a long drive to the other side of the bay.
It took about 20 minutes to drive 50km or so.. then another hour and a half to drive 10.
The road to the volcano was of course not paved, full of holes, and sometimes, close to a 40 degree incline. The road to the top of the adjoining volcano is actually a service road for a thermal power plant that heats and gives electricity to the entire city of Petropavlovsk. The road stretchs through the entirety of the mountains and gives access to all sorts of “nature things”; geysers, waterfalls, hot springs, tops of volcanoes, etc etc.
Anfisa told us a story of a large landslide. When they were originally building the plant, they would drive truckloads of workers to the plant location. On the road, there is a small lake near the base of the volcano. One morning, a truckload of men was driving up the volcano. The driver stopped the truck on the side of the road near the lake to fill up some water. At that exact moment, an extremely large side of the volcano collapsed, sending a HUGE landslide tumbling down and swallowing some of the lake and the entire truckload of men. The driver, still standing by the lake, was untouched. The truck was never found.
crazy.
We spent the majority of the day on the volcano, eating sandwiches, shooting some timelapse, catching some inserts, and realizing the vastness of Kamchatka.
