Kamchatka

The Kamchatka Peninsula is the most north-easterly part of the Eurasian continent. It can be defined as the Russian equivalent to Yellowstone Park. People call the region “the End of Earth”, or ‘terra incognita’ – as there are places in the area where no human foot has ever trodden. Tourists go to Kamchatka and Sakhalin for attractions like the Valley of Geysers and the churning lakes, to pick berries in the craters of extinct volcanoes or to buzz over the active ones by helicopter. Sakhalin’s famous Yuzhno-Sakhalinsky Natural Reserve is listed by UNESCO among its heritage sites. The cinder-plains of volcanic material give the Kamchatkan landscape such a realistic post-apocalyptic aspect that the area was once used to test the Mars Rover used in the Soviet space program – it really makes you feel like you are standing somewhere out of this world.