The Altai

This is a relief model of the Altai in the Barnaul museum. I have numbered some places.
1. Barnaul
2. Biisk
3. Gorno-Altaisk
4. Approximately the place from where the picture of the Katun river valley was taken
5. Approximately the place where I had the shashlik for breakfast
6. Approximately the place from where the picture of the Chuisky Trakt was taken.

To the south is Mongolia. To the west is the eastern border of Kazakhstan, and to the east is the Republic of Tuva, another fascinating part of Russia which I hope to visit soon.

The Altai Krai, or region, is the flat, steppe land around Biisk and Barnaul, and was about the easterlimost area in which Khrushchev implemented his disastrous Virgin Lands programme in the 1950s and 60s. The dotted line on the map that runs just north of Gorno-Altaisk is the border between this area and the Altai Republic, a largely meaningless distinction except geographically since it could be said of Russia today that everything in it belongs to Vladimir Putin, in the same way that it used to be said of the Hebrides that everything there belonged to David MacBrayne (the noted ferryman).