Moscow

Person jumping on the top of a bridge.

A shaman brought us to this ovaa one of our first nights in Tuva. An ovaa is a sacred place of concentrated spiritual power which are often in mountain passes. The shaman performed a ceremony on Melissa involving fire, milk, and wolf mimesis.

While staying with neutrino physicists in Siberia on the frozen surface of Lake Baikal, there was no running water. So, no toilets, no showers...the physicists don't shower at all for two months, so we didn't for the five days we were here either. We got all our water from a small hole in the ice, which usually had to be broken apart with a spear each morning after it froze again.

Siberia

We drove 40 kilometers across the frozen surface of Siberia's Lake Baikal to reach the ice camp where physicists' are trying to capture neutrinos from deep space. The convulsive water beneath the surface causes the ice to break up into cracks and ridges. If the cracks are no more than two feet wide, then the driver speeds up to launch across them (we spun out a couple times and were certain the van would flip). If they're bigger, planks of wood stowed on top of the car are used as a makeshift bridge.

This photo shows one of the reasons the physicists come to Lake Baikal in Siberia to capture extraterrestrial particles from deep space. It's not only the world's oldest (25 - 30 million years), deepest (three Empire State Buildings stacked on top of each other would vanish without a trace), and largest lake (bigger than Belgium and containing 20% of the world's fresh water), it's also the clearest. Crustaceans at all depths eat everything, serving as a natural filter, and keeping the water crystal clear. This creates a zone of visual silence that allows the miniscule possibility of seeing tiny flashes of blue light caused by the unlikely collision between a cosmic neutrino and a molecule of water. If our eyes were the size of watermelons, we could see this ourselves. Instead, the physicists we stayed with send divers into the freezing waters to install a massive homemade neutrino detector (many kilometers large) which uses the entire planet as a filter to stop all particles coming up from the opposite side of the earth, except for neutrinos. They believe this will tell us a tremendous amount about how the universe came into being and how it is held together.

Siberia

Yurts (Tuva)

Tenz Arakchaa in Tuva

Tenz Arakchaa

Sayan Mountains (Tuva)

Tuvan Shaman Near Kyzyl

While taking us out for a day in the Tuvan countryside, Алдар Тамдын (pictured here) brought us to a camp of yurts he built, one of which had a restaurant in it. He ordered us sheep's head soup and boiled blood. Алдар also builds musical instruments, carves totems for shamans, and hunts bears. Did I mention he recorded a record with Lou Reed? Tuva's Minister of Culture happened to be eating at the restaurant when we arrived, and Алдар introduced us.

Aldyn-Bulak, Tuva

Tuva

Siberia

Moscow

Steve, Melissa, and Ted (left to right)

Filming Assistant (Siberia)

Tenz Arakchaa

Sayan Mountains (Tuva)