April 9, 2006

Dobry den iz Lavrentiya!

Friends and Family, here is an update from Lavrentiya. Today is Day 10th in Russia and we are still being “detained” in the village of Lavrentiya.

Sorry if we are not responding to emails but we have very limited access to the internet at this stage, no incoming phone line and phone calls are very expensive for us to make.

Karl and I have limited funds that we currently need to live on before we can receive assistance cash from our respective US consulate and British embassy in this remote town of Lavrentiya where we are being kept. We can’t neither use our credit nor debit cards for any purchase and the local bank does not allow wire transfer. The only phone calls that we are currently making are the domestic ones with the US consulate down in Vladivostok and the British Embassy in Moscow who are currently working actively on our case.

At this stage, even though I am dual citizen I have decided to only work on this matter with the US consulate and not the French embassy to avoid adding any more confusion to the process. If it gets any more serious and they start to talk about imprisonment, I will then of course call for the assistance of the French embassy, if I need to. Some of you have heard from the Russian press that we might risk 5 years of imprisonment but neither one of us nor our respective country of citizenship have been informed of such a thing. Some of you have also offered legal help. Thank you for this but once again we rather work with our embassies/consulates which have extensive experience in the matter. As the US consulate representative has told me the fact that no official arrest has been made so far is good. From what I have learned in other cases, it does happen that the Russian gvt arrest foreigners who have entered the country without the proper type of documentation/visas. ============ .

Saturday we met with the border guards and they return to us some of our gear and our unstamped passports. We are being told to wait and are obviously not allowed to leave the the town of Lavrentiya, 1200 inhabitants.

They kept all of our electronic gear, except headlamps, as well as our skis, poles, harnesses, dry suits, underwater gloves and sled. They also kept obviously the maps and gun which I don’t have any hope to ever see again.

They are telling us that all of our equipment needs to be analysed by experts for the current investigation before any of it can be returned to us and/or before we can be freed to leave Lavrentiya. I have been told by my unofficial contacts in town that 3 FSB agents arrived on Saturday and 12 more are due to arrive today from Moscow. I presume that some of them might be the experts they are talking about. This is in a way is good news because it means that they may not have to ship our items elsewhere for analysis which would have obviously delayed our potential release. I will let you now when and if I receive new information.

Through an intermediary, Karl and I have also received a congratulatory email from Shparo. Shparo is the well connected Russian expedition leader who tried the Bering Strait crossing 3 times. I actually found out that prior to one of his crossing he had to wait 3 weeks in Providenya to sign the appropriate forms to embark on the venture. So, even well connected Russians get delayed with paperwork in Chukotka…

Other than that, our lives in Lavrentiya start to remind me the one of the true life character who spent 10 years in the CDG Paris airport and that Tom Hanks portrayed in the movie “The Terminal”.

Karl and I are progressively learning bits of Russian in order to be able to adapt in this new universe, relying heavily on our Lonely Planey Phrasebook and dictionaries I have borrowed from the local library. Very few local speak English so we do need to dive in as much as we can.

We definitely have enough to eat between what we can get at the local stores and the homemade meals we get from our friend the orthodox priest Leonid who has gave us a place to stay. And finally, we have one radio station that plays a mixture of Russian and US rap and rock from Anadyr which helps the time go by.

Later, Dimitri