From September 5 th to 14th , the Paris based Dakar Rally will stage a 4500 km off road race from Kazan to Ashkabat.

The world famous Paris -Dakar Rally – which began every New Year’s Eve from 1978 to 2008 in the Place Concorde, finishing in Dakar ,Senegal about three weeks later, was discontinued this year because of terrorist threats. It relocated to Chile and Argentina during Southern Summer and the Silk Way Rally will be the adventure for Northern Summer. ArcticTropic will have periodic updates and perhaps will particpate in the race in 2010.

Special thanks go to Alexander Kazantsev of Otkrytie Travels in Moscow, for providing many great photographs in these posts. Many of the rafting photos are courtesy of the trip provider – Quatro Elementos.

Trucks cross a floating bridge in the Amur River on the Russian-Chinese border near Khabarovsk. Note the ships pulling the bridge to keep it in place. In the winter the river freezes solid in -40 degree temperatures and the the trucks drive on the ice. ArcticTropic already has several adventure destinations in the Russian Far East and Siberia.

Kamchatka is the newest area on earth,save for a few islands, and has 15 active volcanoes, is snowbound most of the year,is bigger than California, with only 387,000 people – most of them in Petropavlovsk.

Major boiling points below:

About 100 miles away, over an ice or deep mud road,snowbound 11 months of the year, high into the mountains is a geothermal plant – to harness volcanic energy. Here is one of the buildings. Getting the power to the city is problematic.

A five hour climb brings you into a volcano that sometimes erupts . This is foul smelling hot sulfur gas escaping from the blowhole.One must walk carefully – sinking into the hot earth would turn your leg into charred bone instantly.

Back down in the valley – boiling mud bubbles out of the Earth everywhere – creating a beautiful,surreal scene.

Marketplaces are always a fascinating place to learn about local populations. Here in Vladivostok,Primorye the meat is fresh from the farm. ArcticTropic will have many locations throughout the Russian Far East – a vast land of adventure.

In the Far East Russian City of Khabarovsk were some dingy old Soviet era factories. The old motto in these places was “We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.””They” being Soviet slavemasters creating make-work factories to churn out shoddy useless products – and have shortages of such products. ArcticTropic leads adventure travelers to explore everyday life in distant points of the Earth.

In Petropavlovsk,Kamchatka a 50 meter high statue of Lenin keeps watch on the now booming port – off limits to outsiders in Communist times. There will be plenty more still shots and videos of Kamchatka and other Russian adventure destinations. On ArcticTropic there are two ways of reaching Russian listings – from both the European and Asian map entry points.