When I was first asked if I wanted to take a journey to Siberia to discover the roots of the Korean people, I thought, “Isn’t that why I came to Korea in the first place?” However, as the ancestral birthplace and staging area for the Korean independence movement, the vast Russian region was a fitting location for a pilgrimage to commemorate the 60th anniversary of Korea’s sovereignty as a nation.

We were a rally of 18 SUVs, with government officials and a TV crew in tow. On July 22, our caravan of 12 cars started from Busan via Vladivostok, on Russia’s East Coast, while another six cars headed east from Moscow. Both teams converged on Aug. 9 in Irkutsk, one of Siberia’s major cities, near the mythical Lake Baikal. Together, we covered the largest country in the world, twice the size of the continental United States and 172 times the size of South Korea.

Kye Dong Park, Korea’s vice-chair of the Committee on Unification, Foreign Affairs, and Trade, came up with the idea. He used to be a taxi driver and, fortunately for him, loves to drive. He hatched the idea while talking to a friend in the Russian Parliament. “I asked him how long it would take to drive from Vladivostok to Lake Baikal,” said Park. “[My friend] said about 15 days.”

Of course, there were political and economic motives that bankrolled this Indiana Jones-style adventure. Ultimately, however, the Korean-Russian Eurasia Expedition evolved out of a partnership between government, media and nonprofit interests.

In the coastal cities of Siberia (otherwise known as the Russian Far East, and as Yonhae-ju by Koreans), Russian and Korean officials exchanged tokens of friendship in ceremonies of music and dance. It was Vladivostok’s 145th anniversary, as well as the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II. Our itinerary included visits to: Far Eastern National University, which boasts the oldest and largest Korean studies department in the world; the memorial of freedom fighter Sang Seol Lee; the ancient remains of the legendary Balhae kingdom, which is currently a source of contention between China and Korea; and the site of a former Koreatown, which, in its heyday in the early 1900s, was a thriving community and bastion of the independence movement.

Camping alongside a river in Siberia.

Perhaps the excursion’s most sobering moment was at the railway station where, in 1937, 200,000 Koreans were packed into cattle cars and deported to Central Asia on a harrowing journey that lasted 40 days. Without adequate food, water and protection, 20 percent or more starved or froze to death along the way. They were left stranded in the middle of nowhere during winter with nothing. Just as the United States had imprisoned Japanese Americans, Stalin exiled Russia’s Korean citizens out of fear that some might be Japanese spies. The tragic irony, of course, was that many who were deported were active in the resistance movement against Japan.