Tuva bound

We're off to Tuva on Thursday. We're not taking the computer as we don't want to get it dusty in the yurt. So we will be out of email contact for a couple of weeks. This should be one of the blogging highlights of the year, but you want get daily updates- sorry! I will try to take a journal down there and then post some highlights after we get back on the 26th.

Preparing for this trip has been a bit crazy. Our friend Aidys has gone a bit incognito since he went home for the Summer. Another friend down there has thankfully contacted us and knows when we are coming and we have a place to stay. Apparently Aidys has gone to visit his girlfriend in the village. Hopefully he will be back by the time we get there. He is expecting us.

Anyway, our plans are to spend time meeting his family and our other friends down there who study in Novo. We also plan to stay in a yurt with Aidys' grandparents. It should be a real eye opener for us into Tuvan culture. Tuva has been described as "Mongolia with roads."

We were a bit worried when we realised that we will need to register with the authorities down there and we didn't have a plan. After speaking to some hotels on the phone we have discovered that one of our friends can take us to the immigration services office to register us as visitors to Tuva. If we did not do this properly we could end up with a large fine and risk being asked to leave the country. So please pray that our registration process works smoothly down there.

A few facts for you about Tuva:

Tuva is located right in the centre of the continent of Asia, on the north west border of Mongolia. It is an Autonomous Republic within the Federation of Russia, although the president of Russia, appointed the new president to Tuva in April this year, contrary to practices since 1991.

Tuva is 170 500 kms sq, which is about 3/4 the size of Victoria or 1 1/2 times the size of Newfoundland. The population is 305 500 and the density is 1.8 persons per square km (compared to 2.6 for Australia, 3.2 for Canada, 22.47 for Victoria (state), 13.2 for Alberta and 1.72 for Saskatchewan.

The capital of Tuva is the city of Kyzyl. The population of Kyzyl is 105 000.

The land is a mixture of mountains and steppes. In fact the steppes are really valleys between the mountains, so the mountains stretch across the republic. Quite a good mix for a Victorian boy and a Prairie girl really.

The official religion of Tuva is Buddhism, although the folk religion is Shamanism. Recently a Tuvan friend explained that "Shamanism is for every day living and Buddhism is for spirituality."

The official languages of Tuva are Tuvan and Russian. Around 240 000 of the people who live in Tuva are ethnic Tuvans, leaving the Russians as the ethnic minority. Most Russians live in the cities and larger towns. There are officially five cities in Tuva. The smallest of these cities is around 5 000 people. Tuvans do not speak Russian usually until they start school, so the Tuvan language is still very strong across the republic, but Russian still has a very strong influence.

Tuvan culture is historically greatly influenced by Mongolian culture. The Tuvan language however, belongs to the Turkic language family. When in Turkey we learnt the word for milk, which is "sut" and is actually the same in Tuvan. The language has taken many borrowings from Mongolia throughout history and from Russian in more recent times.

We have found it impossible to buy any books on the Tuvan language in Novosibirsk or in Moscow, so we hope to pick something up in Kyzyl. We also hope to buy a book of Tuvan folk stories.

We will be gone between July 12th to 26th.

Read more about Tuva here.