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drip…
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drip…
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drip…
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It had rained all night, and I woke up in a damp tent:

All my things were spread around me, and most of them were a bit wet. Luckily the cameras were okay.

I crawled out of my sleeping bag and out of my tent, and I looked around the bug-infested forest that was our campsite:

Spiders, mosquitos, wasps, ticks, snakes, bears, tigers… – they are supposed to have them all out here in the woods of Приморье (Primorye).

I swam with a deep fear of (non-existing) sharks, but stayed totally ignorant to the fact that I was adding more and more sunburns to my body. Then in the afternoon, I somehow wound up on a tourist trip through a section of the nature reserve:

We made sure not to leave ANYTHING unphotographed:

I even took a picture of some shrubs because our guide told us that a siberian tiger had peed on them:

And then there was the story of the mysterious French cycling couple…

The guide did her best to explain: “They wanted to cycle around the whole world, a man and a woman. When they got here, they made this circle out of white pebbles. We don’t know why they did this. Then the woman decided to quit cycling and settle down in an area a few hundred kilometers from here. We don’t know why she did that either.”

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Apparently, almost all of the surrounding landscapes were equally breathtaking and belonged to one large nature reserve:

…

We walked through a bit of the forest, and the guide said that we probably wouldn’t get a chance to spot a tiger, but the tiger might have already spotted us:

What an exciting idea!

I think we were all on the lookout for stripes of black and yellow (that weren’t wasps or bees), but the only thing that we were able to find was this:

The guide told us that this kind of mushroom was called Царь (Tsar).

Mhh..

Later that night, everybody gathered around a fire and some candles on the beach and had sandwiches and mulled wine:

One younger guy got a guitar out and started going into some Nirvana-chords, but just when the letters “WTF” were about to start flashing on the inside of my skull, some lady got the brilliant idea to snatch the guitar away from him and start singing something more… traditional.

…she hadn’t sung but two words, when the rest of the group joined in. “Подмосковные вечера” (Podmoskovnye Vechera – Moscow Nights) was the name of the song:

Beautiful.

There were many other nice songs that night, but I only recorded a few more minutes of “Катюша” (Katyusha):

…

Hint: Tigers and mosquitos have at least one thing in common – they like to hunt at night.

Soundtrack: Nirvana – “Smells Like Teen Spirit”

Posted on Wednesday, August 11th, 2010 22:50 ;Filed under Nightshots, Primorye, Things..., Video.

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