Though it's been open to foreigners for a while, getting travel information on Russia's Arctic Kola Peninsula remains a little tricky.
Bureaucrats walk an unfamiliar line.
Trained by Soviets, they're unwilling to divulge information, but a desperation for foreign visitors and their cash requires openness. The results are often amusing. Camping, booms Vladimir Loginov, chairman of the Murmansk Regional Sports Committee, is legal anywhere on the Kola Peninsula. Except in the places in which it is not. The Kola Peninsula is an enormous knob of tundra, forest and low mountains between the White and Barents seas.