Kamchatka - The Lost World

Discover everything that makes Kamchatka a paradise for nature lovers and intrepid adventures whose dream is to wander far from the well-trodden path. Our comprehensive Kamchatka adventure tour takes place over 18 of the most memorable days you’ll ever experience. With almost three weeks to explore the peninsula, this uncommon journey allows you to traverse vast distances to remote lands and explore all the most breathtaking highlights of Russia’s mythical Far East.

Staying in a mix of hotels, wooden cabins, and spectacular campgrounds, and travelling by helicopter and 4WD, we visit as many unique habitats as possible. Feast your eyes and cameras with the volcanic ranges and lava fields of the Pacific Ring of Fire, untouched swathes of old-growth forest, mountain hot springs, majestic coastline and the wind-swept tundra where Kamchatka’s last nomads make their summer camps alongside their reindeer herds.

Kamchatka – an adventure in a lost world highlights:

• Fly to Kurilskoye Lake via helicopter. During salmon season, Kuril Lake is one of the few places you can observe brown bears in their natural habitat at close proximity. To get the best chance of heart-stoppingly close encounters and amazing photos ops, we’ll watch the bears feeding along the shore from a motorboat, as well as on-land from a viewing platform overlooking prime fishing territory

• Travel cross-country on remote roads to Central Kamchatka, home of the Even and Koryak tribes, the “people of the reindeer”, who set up their summer camps near the village of Esso. You’ll be granted the extraordinary privilege of experiencing traditional nomad life, spending a night camped out with the herders in their tents

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Reindeer Herders Festival in Yamal 2023

The Reindeer Herder’s Festival is a one-day holiday, celebrated annually in the main cities and villages in the Yamalo-Nenets region in the Russian Arctic. For the nomadic Nenets people, a festival day is a major event, which offers a chance to meet with friends and compete in contests of physical skill and a variety of other competitions.

It has also become an event in which the Nenets are able to share with the world a fascinating slice of their unique culture, which has remained relatively unchanged throughout the centuries. On this tour not only will you witness the Reindeer Herders’ Festival in Yamal but you will also stay with a Nenet family far from the city, giving you an amazing opportunity to fully immerse yourself in the nomadic way of life and if you are lucky enough, to witness Northern Lights.

Reindeer herders festival trip highlights:

• Salekhard (population 43,000) is the only city in the world located right at the Polar Circle. Despite its remoteness, it harbours a great deal of wealth as the city at the centre of one of the world’s richest oil and gas regions.

• From Salekhard, we’ll travel to a nomad camp to spend two days living with the Nenets and sleeping in their chums (tepee-style reindeer skin tents). The Nenets are one of the last surviving grounds of reindeer-herding nomads, making this experience an extraordinary privilege. Take part in day-to-day activities around the camp, herding and lassoing reindeer, sledding into the forest to cut firewood and assisting in the erecting of new chums, with plenty of time in between to relax, socialise and just take in the atmosphere.

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Reindeer Migration with the Nenets in Yamal

As the world gets smaller, we desire to travel further – and there are few places as enchantingly far away as Yamal. This cultural immersion transports you deep into Russia’s isolated Arctic region. ‘Yamal’ means ‘edge of the world’ in the language of the indigenous Nenets. The Nenets of Yamal carves out a unique way of life, seemingly at the limits of human tolerance.

Each spring, the Nenets migrate from winter pastures on the Russian mainland to the summer pastures in the Arctic Circle, a one-way journey of up to 1,000km. This is your chance to experience a small part of this epic journey alongside these extraordinarily resilient people. This is a remarkable extraordinary opportunity to get to know one of the world’s last true nomadic reindeer herders through their eyes.

Yamal Reindeer Migration with Nenets – expedition highlights:

• Salekhard is the only city in the world located right at the Polar Circle. Among the highlights on our tour of the city is the Shemanovskiy Yamal-Nenets District Museum, which includes an exhibition on mammoth remains found in the region
• Travel to the Polar Ural Mountains to an encampment of nomadic Nenets reindeer herders

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Kamchatka's Critters and Craters

This comprehensive  Kamchatka summer tour will take you to many of the most spectacular volcanic landscapes and prime wildlife spotting locations on the peninsula, despite the challenges of travelling in a largely undeveloped region defined by vast distances and the virtual absence of sealed roads.

We’ll also visit remote Koryak and Evens settlements in Central Kamchatka and be welcomed into the summer camps where they graze their reindeer herds in the tundra. At times exhausting and frequently exhilarating, these unforgettable two weeks in Russia’s Eastern frontier will send you home with a newfound appreciation of the raw power and beauty of Mother Nature and the importance of preserving these last remaining tracts of untouched wilderness.

Best of Kamchatka Summer Tour Highlights:

• Take a breathtakingly scenic flight on a Mi-8 helicopter to Kurilskoye Lake, with a bonus flyover of the summit of Kusdach volcano. With a bit of luck, we’ll land near the summit and walk to the deep blue lake in the crater of the volcano, where’s it is actually possible to swim for short periods in the lake’s ‘hot beach’

• Spend 2 incredible days among the brown bears of Kuril Lake. As the bears’ only interest is in gorging themselves on the salmon swimming upstream to breed, visitors can observe wild bear families at unbelievably close proximity. We’ll observe the bears both from boats and from a special viewing platform overlooking prime fishing grounds 

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