I have been away the first two weeks of August to a faraway land called Tuva. I can guess the vast majority of you have never been there, but don’t feel bad about it, people go there either because they have an interest in throat-singing (!), unspoiled nature or they have married someone from there.I belong to the last category, but first of all: where the hell is Tuva? You may (rightly) ask?
Well, Tuva is a republic in Russia, but not the White Russia we all think of, such as Moscow or Saint Petersburg. The Russia I am talking about is actually Siberia, that big mass of land covering 77% of the Russian territory that almost everyone has heard of, but at the same time almost nobody ever dares to visit.
Siberia is a very weird place indeed, no doubt about it: freezing cold in winter, boiling hot in summer, thousands of miles away from any urban environment, and even more miles away from the sea. Talk about Siberia and people think about the hard weather, Communist gulags and a very big chunk of land that to see it all it would take you a couple of lifetimes. This is rather true, not only because Siberia is so damn big, but also because travelling around is not that easy, they haven’t got four lane highways over there and not many airports too.
Tuva is located in the southern part of Siberia (but it is still on average -30 degrees Celsius in winter), on the border with Mongolia. It is slightly more than half the size of Italy, but with the population only of a city like Bologna, and actually one third of this population live in the capital, Kyzyl. Basically, once you drive outside the capital, you have the whole country for yourself.
I have mentioned throat-singers at the beginning of this article. Throat-singers are, as the name indicates, singers who sing using their throat. The kind of music they sing and play is not for everybody’s taste, but the sound they create is rather amazing. They can come up with up to five different tones at the same time and they master the art from an early age.
Tuva, as all geeks of geography know, is located right in the centre of Asia and the exact spot is in the capital Kyzyl, right next to the river Yenisei (the fifth longest river in the world, sorry geeks, I beat you again) that runs through the city. A monument, consisting of a big world-shaped stone and a kind of triangular obelisk rising from it, has been raised on the spot.
But I cannot talk about Tuva without mentioning the nature. I have been exploring a very tiny part of the country, but in that tiny bit I have been to a lake with the same level of salt as the Dead Sea in Israel! I didn’t know about its existence until I was there and never before I had seen so many eagles flying across the sky and an open road in front of me with mountains and valley as the only companions.
There are many things to say about Tuva, some good other rather not, that it would take me quite a while so I will leave it for future posts, anyway I feel like a kind of an expert in the country being now linked with it by marriage to one of its daughters and also by the fact that no many foreigners have actually been there.
