When breakfast is a mound of bichromate-orange salmon eggs on black bread, washed down by a mug of VSOP cognac, you know the coming day will be unusual, and possibly a little hazy. Multiply that by seven, add the late-night drinking sessions – vodka, not cognac, according to local tradition – and a single week can seem like a long time. Then throw in travel by low-flying helicopter, the daily threat of asphyxiation by poison gas or mauling by wild animals, naked swimming, flagellation, blood-sucking insects, bribery, extortion, and a bloody fist-fight, and things veer decidedly towards the surreal.
I had heard Kamchatka stories – the appellation given by sceptical wives to the tall tales told by returning travellers – from the Russian friend who organised our 10 days in the Kamchatka peninsula in late summer. The scepticism is entirely forgivable. If people have heard of the place at all, it is as the remotest territory of the board game Risk; no road was ever built to this far eastern peninsula of forest, tundra and extra-planetary geology. Moscow is a 10-hour flight away.
A wilderness of nearly half a million square kilometres, roughly the size of Germany, Austria and Switzerland put together, it has the population of Bristol. Little more than a decade ago it was still a military zone, site of many a secret cold war installation and forbidden even to Russian citizens living beyond the region. Today the secrecy has lifted, and Kamchatka is becoming known as one of the world's last and largest natural sanctuaries, with one wild bear to every 30 inhabitants.
The peninsula itself resembles a giant salmon – a fitting symmetry, given its main natural resource – fleeing southwards from the Russian mainland down towards Japan.
It is the sheer spectacle of the natural environment that pulls people here, and eco-tourism is the region's burgeoning industry. Parts of Kamchatka resemble the Earth as it must have looked in the early chapters of its creation. "Here boil the mud-pots, roar the fumaroles, and stand the sulphuric pillars" reads a local guidebook. Many countries boast a single volcano; Kamchatka has about 300, of which 30 are active and erupt with dazzling regularity. There are hundreds of thermal springs, revered for their health-giving powers, and 100,000 lakes and rivers, all bursting with fish. Rare eagles, seabirds and marine mammals live along its cliffs and coastline; inland, bear, reindeer, moose and wolf roam natural parks, preserves and refuges the size of European countries.
We did wonder whether 10 days would suffice.
Half the population of Kamchatka lives in the capital city, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, founded by the Danish explorer Vitus Bering in 1740 and named after his twin ships, Saint Peter and Saint Paul. In 1854, a joint Anglo-French naval force besieged the city in a bid to take the entire peninsula, and was beaten off in a heroic defence with the cannons that today line the commemorative promenade above the bay. After Alaska had been sold to America in 1867, the area lost its importance as a trading post and only a few thousand intrepid Russians stayed.
Petropavlosk is an unbeautiful city wholly at odds with its dramatic natural setting. The glittering harbour, beyond the gantries, cranes and Soviet-era housing, is overlooked by the active Avachinsky and Koryaksky volcanoes.
These days the visitors are mostly Russians (but the number of foreigners is growing fast), an eclectic crowd of big game trophy hunters (the 10 largest bears killed in Russia have all been Kamchatkan), anglers, heli-skiers and snowboarders, nature lovers and wildlife enthusiasts, and even the occasional minor oligarch with an Englishman in tow.
We had arrived in brilliant sunshine, but the following morning the city was wrapped in fog and our onward journey by helicopter hung in the balance. There are roads, of a sort, beyond the capital, but their scarcity makes helicopters the preferred, if less economical, alternative. In the afternoon, a break in the whiteness sent us racing, together with a guide and cook, to the airport, where we boarded an ageing Mi-8 helicopter that looked as though it had been brought out of storage for us. We headed north-west out of the fog above a canopy of deep green vegetation embossed with horseshoe-shaped meanders. In every direction we could see the tiered profiles of one volcano after another, looming from the misty horizon.
Our first camp was at the foot of one of them, beside a three mile-wide lake. This was Karimsky, one of the more active volcanoes, our guide told us, pointing to an ominous plume of steam rising from its crater. Its magnetic grandeur silenced everything but the mosquitoes, which feasted on us in skin-darkening swarms.
By day we hiked the perimeter of the lake, wondering how fresh were the bear tracks that lined the shore, and at dusk we watched a spectral mist flowing over the lower slopes of the volcano. We also worked on our thermal bathing skills, lowering ourselves into the lake where streaks of brilliantly coloured algae betrayed the presence of a hot mineral spring, alternately gasping and cursing in the freezing and scalding currents.
Our first bear appeared after one such session. It skidded down a dusty slope of lava and sniffed the air just where, minutes earlier, we had been lying naked in the water. Then it moved on, patrolling the water's edge for salmon with that deceptively easy lope that disguises the species' immense strength. It wouldn't find much fish, said our guide. In a 1996 underwater eruption, the entire lake is said to have boiled, producing the world's largest cauldron of fish soup.
Our next destination was a fishing lodge, one of a dozen on the winding Zhupanova river, half an hour's flight away on a much smaller but equally noisy helicopter. "The probability of fish trophies," read our itinerary, "is 100%." That sounded extravagant, but it turned out to be perfectly true.
We glimpsed the lodge from above, a plume of smoke rising into the forest, and clattered to earth by a cluster of buildings whose steep wooden gables and carved balconies evoked the enchanted forest dwellings of Russian fairy tales. It claimed to be one of Vladimir Putin's favourite hideaways.
He and President Medvedev's bodyguards, said one of the staff, would sleep in the open on the balconies and contend with the mosquitoes. It seemed an unlikely destination for a head of state, but in the dining room, run by a pair of stout and taciturn aproned ladies, three incongruously worldly clocks above the door showed the time in Moscow, Kamchatka and Washington.
We had been promised fishing. From the banks of the river we could see the shadowy outlines of countless salmon, swimming upstream in funereal convoys. After being at sea for several years, salmon return in summer to the sites of their birth to spawn and die, and hardly feed along their final journey. But small species of trout, char and younger salmon swim beside them in Edenic abundance. So heading upstream, to a sandbank where the bear prints outnumber the human prints, we fished.
Or rather, we murdered. We had expected to spend a contemplative day with occasional moments of excitement, but the fish fell onto our lines with disconcerting eagerness. We wondered whether a specially trained staff member from the lodge was lurking underwater, hooking them onto our lures. Our main trophy was a species of char, like an oversized trout with delicate pink spots, called goletz in Russian. Guiltily, we returned early to the lodge, but were glad to discover later that our catch had gone into a delicious soup that later fed not only us but the entire staff.
Evenings found us in the banya, the Russian version of a sauna. A plunge pool had been filled with icy, cloudy water from the river, and a sheaf of birch leaves left at our disposal. As we cooled off in a state of speechless languor after a good steaming, it seemed unremarkable that an enormous brown bear should emerge from the forest, wander by a few yards from us, and then plunge into the river beyond to scoop up a pawful of hapless salmon.
We'd been promised a closer look at a volcano too, so we flew to the site of the most dramatic eruption in Kamchatka's recorded history. (Our guide had said he would be taking us to a giant slag produced by a catastophic erection, and wondered why we sniggered.) At Tolbachik in 1975, the earth split open as a string of new volcanoes was born. The ejected magma was measured in millions of tonnes and the airborne debris in cubic kilometres. A lethal shroud of black ash suffocated the surrounding land. Today, at the periphery of the destruction, acres of bleached trees poke upwards from the ash like matchsticks. We made a slow ascent to the smouldering summit, a place of demonic beauty, until our boots began to melt on the rock and sulphuric fumes forced us to retreat.
Then we glissaded down the powdery slopes, jumped aboard our waiting helicopter, and flew to a picnic spot at the edge of an obliterated forest.
We were sad to leave our fairytale lodge for the harshness of the ordinary world, where the other side of Russia confronted us all too suddenly. At our hotel a bloody fist fight, fuelled by all-day drinking, broke out between the staff of rival airlines. Later, at the airport, a handsome official with piercing blue eyes found fault with our registration papers and threatened us with detention – until we relented with the appropriate sum.
Later, boarding the onward flight to England, we forgot that we had stowed several bottles of exotic vodka, and were turned back at security with orders to dispose of them. But this was Russia, where corruption works both ways. A woman who worked for the airline took pity on us and agreed to smuggle the bottles past security and deliver them back to us as we boarded the plane. It was highly illegal. All she wanted was a box of chocolates.