In 1890, Russian writer Anton Chekhov journeyed across the belly of Russia to its eastern border. It was a voyage of 9,656 km. His trip went well beyond the kind of journey that the travelers of today seek aboard the Trans-Siberian Express. Chekhov's destination was the the remote island of Sakhalin, Russia's most feared penal colony. His purpose was to examine the lives of its captives. Recalling his journey and the harsh conditions of Sakhalin, he once wrote, "I have seen Ceylon, and it is heaven: And now I have seen Sakhalin, and it is hell."
The Sakhalin of Chekhov's time was a place of near-unendurable hardship: Those who were banished there were forced into hard labor, and diseases were rife. Even today, Chekhov's despondent images linger in the mind. The intensity of the hardships is matched by the fury of the volcanic activity and the shifting tectonic plates that support Sakhalin. But there is much more to Sakhalin, an island of tremendous natural beauty.
Getting there, though, can be a task in itself. Sakhalin Air flies to the capital, Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, from Sapporo Chitose and Hakodate. There is also a daily ferry service during the summer months from Wakkanai to the port of Korsakov on Sakhalin's southern tip. It was from Hakodate that I boarded a 1960s Antonov-24, a 36-seat turboprop, for the two-hour flight across the Sea of Okhotsk. Yuzhno (as the capital is called) is a small city of 180,000 that has been open to the outside world for only the past decade. Prior to the 1990s, the island of Sakhalin was off-limits to most visitors. At least one Cold War conspiracy theory argues that the doomed Korean Air flight 007, which was shot down after straying into Soviet airspace, may have actually landed in Yuzhno before being attacked. Such theories aside, Sakhalin's location and turbulent history make it an interesting destination.