Our Director of Photography Sean O’Sullivan has been traveling with the Caravan since it rolled out of Bangkok on March 17th. He rotated out for a month and is now back with a fresh perspective. Here’s the first of a multi-part series f life on the road as Vikrom and his Caravan crisscrosses Asia.

I flew into Irkutsk from Cape Town via Dubai and Moscow. That night we camped on the shores of Lake Baikal. Bluest water I ever did see with forested hills behind. I went for a swim and it was icy cold. Its high summer here so its dandelions and poppies waving happily in the wind…. but even at midday there is a bite in the breeze. This is Siberia.

We’ve come some 2000kms from Irkutsk to Novosibirsk. The larger towns are European enclaves in what is still a wilderness. The trans Siberian highway is in poor repair in places, the villages are half deserted. People have left for the cities west of the Urals. It has always been hard to settle this part of Russia. The summers are short, the winters brutal and long.

We camped next to the road several times. Russia is not China and we have three security guards for just in case. That’s how they put it. They’re all ex army.

Siberia is empty. There seem to be no people. Peasant farmers sell mushrooms and raspberries along the road. We stop to buy from them. All the young people seem to have gone.

These forests are the largest on earth and crowd the main road in places. Only 30 million people in an area the size of the USA.

The landscape is European…but removed in time and space… we are east of India… strangely enough. Many of the villages look straight out of the nineteenth century. Wooden houses, horses with ploughs, Russian Orthodox Church and rutted roads. Mongolia is 200 kms away, south.

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