In the morning there was some lab work to do: drying of some of the vegetation samples we had collected and some subsampling of peat cores taken from our measurement sites at Mukhrino. After lunch we had a walk around Shapsha village which seemed very small and quiet. We later heard lots of loud music coming from nearby and went out to explore, this was from a private party in the nearby small animal zoo, although they also had three Brown bears in cages.
This second trip around Shapsha was more successful in that we found the location of both shops and went in to one of them to buy snacks! I was really after a packet of crisps and they had a good choice of crisps and plenty other foods in store. We then walked towards the river (a large tributary of the River Ob) and found many people along the floodplain spending the day there. There was people fishing and boating, swimming and having barbecues and it made the village of Shapsha seem quite a bit bigger than the first walk!
In the evening Elena Lapshina, our host here, came to join us and brought some Vodka for toasts with our meal, it was the last night for Richard, Joss and Angela, who return home tomorrow. Myself, Roxane and Mark however, have another 10 days and a new field station to visit a few hundred kilometers north.
