Getting to Kamchatka: The Long Way Around

I guess it should come as no surprise that it would be a little complicated getting to one of the most remote places on earth.  Although, on the one hand, it is surprisingly close, especially for those of us living in the Pacific Northwest.  Not long ago, one could get there from Seattle in less than two four hour flights by jumping on a flight to Anchorage, then taking a Vladivostok Air flight to Petropavlovsk (PKC).  Unfortunately, Vladivostok Air (http://www.vladivostokavia.ru/en/passengers/) discontinued this leg, and so with it, went a segment of Kamchatka’s tourism.  If you believe in eco-tourism or ever desire to visit this place consider dropping them a line and expressing your interest in future flights.

On the other hand, take a look at this picture by NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio (http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/) of the human-made lights around the world that show particularly well the heavily developed areas of our planet.  Also, note the typical euro-centric view of a map of the earth and two things come to mind:  the Kamchatka Peninsula is often shoved up in the corner, even getting left off of many maps (like it barely matters), and it is still one dark piece of land.  And I think it would be a safe assumption to say that the dark spots in this photo are place that are still difficult to reach (That one tiny blip of light northeast of Japan marks our destination).

So what would be our route into this undeveloped corner of the world?  Seoul, South Korea, we were told, would be the next most direct route into the Russian Far East; however, as we begun looking into the various options for travel, it became clear that this route would be too expensive requiring multiple tickets with no airline networks taking us all the way from Seattle to PKC.  All the search aggregators (with Kayak.com being my favorite for obvious reasons) were telling us that we would literally have to fly around the world to get to one of the wildest place on earth:  SEA > JFK (New York) > SVO (Moscow) > PKC.  Ugghh!  At least 30+ hours sitting in planes, not to mention layovers, baggage checks, customs, etc.

Finding a flight route to a destination is one thing.  Getting six kayaks, associated gear and media equipment is another.  So began the inevitable task of any major kayak expedition – to research excess baggage policies of the airlines flying these routes.  These policies are often arbitrary and out-dated as reflected with many carriers response to kayaks by strictly not allowing them – because when the policy was written kayaks were likely 12 feet long and fragile.  For several years now kayaks have been more the shape and size of a surfboard, and many a kayaker has bagged their kayak, called it a surfboard and checked it as such to get around these policies.  But we wanted to try and choose an airline that would allow kayaks to avoid any complications at check-in.  This research provided us with pretty much one option, as described above – going through New York to avoid small regional planes, then to Moscow, then across all 11 time zones of Russia.

Along with finding a route has been nailing down specific dates.  Coordinating river flows, fish migrations, partnering film crews and visa requirements has prevented us from buying tickets to date; however, we think the stars have finally aligned.  We hope to be purchasing our tickets in the coming week, fulfilling a major component of the logistics of just getting to this place – the wild and remote Kamachatka Peninsula.  The team is stoked!

-Shane