The first part of the town's name bears witness to the area's key natural resource - salt (the second part of the name refers to the nearby Ilek River, a left tributary of the Ural). For all the charm of the lakes of Sol-Iletsk, tourists' ears and nerves may find it hard to cope with the non-stop pop music, of debatable quality, which booms out from the ubiquitous loudspeakers. However, it would be stretching it a little to call it peaceful. In the summer there isn't room to swing a cat, but at the beginning of May the place is deserted. The holiday park, Sol-Iletsk-kurort LLC, presides over four other lakes - Maloe Gorodskoe, Bolshoe Gorodskoe, Teploe and Novoe.
Lakes Dunino and Tuzluchnoe are moderately salty and muddy. Lake Razval caught the attention of director Alexander Proshkin, who filmed the 2003 adventure film Trio here. This lake has a permafrost floor, and the water temperature at a depth of four metres is below 0 ☌. It is 300m wide at its widest point, and in places its depth reaches about 20 metres. Lake Razval covers an area of approximately 7 hectares (17 acres). Due to its salinity, the lake never freezes over, even during extremely intense frosts, and it does not sustain any life. The density of the water is greater than that of the human body, so anyone trying to dive is pushed straight back up to the surface. The salt concentration in Lake Razval is similar to that of the Dead Sea or, according to some sources, may even exceed it. Three of the lakes - Razval, Dunino and Tuzluchnoe - are 120 metres above sea level, and cover a total of 53 hectares (130 acres). It is set right in the midst of a holiday resort that welcomes hundreds of thousands of holiday-makers every year, and which at the start of May is awash with colour - lilac and apple green. However, the same can be said of the location of this prison camp for offenders serving life sentences. Travelling in a comfortable coach to a destination next to the gates of one of the harshest prisons in Russia undoubtedly arouses cognitive dissonance. This railway was laid in 1877, and one of the first passengers to use it was a certain Count Leo Tolstoy. In places, however, there are still oil transportation wagons on the line that carry the name of the defunct company. These now belong to Rosneft, as testified by the lettering on the hangars. While the train is still in the Moscow region, at one point the luxury dachas almost immediately make way for the typical Russian scenery of tumble-down rural houses and miles and miles of uninhabited space.Īfter passing through Syzran, once one of the outposts of YUKOS' oil production, where the disgraced oil company built the modern Nadezhda ('Hope') health and fitness complex, you travel past derricks topped with gas flares. The journey from Moscow's Kazan railway station to Orenburg is a little over 1,500 kilometres, which the Orenburzhye, a high-speed, deluxe train, covers in just over 26 hours.
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