Word: peninsulas
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...Nine time zones from Moscow, Kamchatka has just begun to attract visitors. (A five-hour flight from Anchorage, Alaska, is the only international air connection to the peninsula). The 1,207-km-long region was off-limits to most Russians, not to mention foreigners, during the cold war because it was the site of a nuclear-submarine base and military radar installations. Today nearly a third of Kamchatka is protected nature reserves, including five parks designated a World Heritage Site by UNESCO...
...peninsula's capital, Petropavlovsk, founded in 1740 by Danish explorer Vitus Bering?Xfor whom the Bering Sea and Strait are named?Xis a morass of Soviet-style apartment blocks and potholed streets, incongruously framed by a mist-swathed harbor and snowcapped volcanoes. Its few hotels and restaurants are drab. Yet we found a certain eccentric charm in menus featuring "fern salad" and "boiled pieces of paste" for breakfast and "burning mussels with rice" and "cowberry drink" for dinner...
...government have dried up. Corruption is rampant, with poachers depleting the region's vast fisheries. Nature reserves are under threat from mining and energy projects. Electricity is frequently shut down, even during the brutal winters. As a park ranger noted while guiding us through the thermal springs of the peninsula's Valley of Geysers, "This is the only place in Kamchatka where they can't cut off your hot water...
...Part of the "Ring of Fire," the string of volcanoes that encircles the Pacific Ocean, Kamchatka has more than 100 volcanoes, 29 of them active, along with spectacular concentrations of geysers and thermal springs. For nine months a year, snow blankets the peninsula, and only by July does it melt sufficiently to enable comfortable hiking. Well, let's say relatively comfortable. During our mid-August trek, it rained half the time. Much of the interior is accessible only by helicopter, and tourists who fly into a volcanic site for an afternoon can occasionally be stranded for days...
...Despite the bellicose rhetoric coming out of North Korea, most Japanese remain relatively unconcerned about the possibility of a nuclear attack. They still believe that the U.S. will protect them from Pyongyang's threatened "sea of fire." But Japan's political leaders do worry about the peninsula: as they see it, a breakthrough in relations between North and South Korea that freezes out Japan and the U.S. would be a regional disaster. Indeed, many people believe that the Japanese government would rewrite the peace constitution if faced with a real prospect of Korean unification or of the U.S. withdrawing...