Lake Baikal

Whilst Irkutsk was surprisingly nice (and I'm sure its pelmeni festival was even better), the whole point of the stop there was to use the city as a base to see Lake Baikal, the deepest, oldest and clearest freshwater lake in the world. We took the bus down to Listvyanka - a village beside the lake - which was a 90 minute journey on a freezing old boneshaker barely warmer than outside. Admittedly, it probably didn't help that I chose to sit next to the window that was broken, but as that was the only window you could actually see through I decided that early-stage hypothermia was a small price to pay in order to see the pretty Siberian hills and forests.

Basically, Lake Baikal was huge, breezy and frozen. Unfortunately due to lack of monies (on my part, of course) we did not go dog-sledding or snowmobiling, but we spent the day wondering around the lakeside and around the pretty village of Listvyanka, which is where my glasses met their aforementioned doom. I did try to persuade Katie that she really wanted to go for a little hike in the snow up the hills around Listvyanka (and there are some photos of me looking like a demented guide leader going 'tally ho,' but at -25 she for some reason didn’t seem particularly keen on the idea.

Here are some pictures of the frozen north:







Lake Baikal would also be absolutely wonderful in the summer; it’s surrounded by mountains and in July and August is apparently even warm enough for what the guide book calls, I suspect rather euphemistically, an ‘invigorating dip.’ I now, of course, I have a lovely idea for a future summer trip – in the mythical future time when I finally get some money – crystallizing in my brain. I think it would be rather fabulous to fly to Beijing, take the train to UB and spend a few weeks in Mongolia horse-trekking and wandering around with nomads, head up to Baikal for some hiking in the pretty alpine scenery around the lake, then take the Baikal-Amur Mainline (a line that goes north of the main trans-Siberian that few people and hardly any travellers ever take) to the Pacific Coast, or even – if the line’s reached there by the time I go – to Yakutsk, where you can catch a boat down the Lena River all the way to the Arctic Ocean. One day this shall be done, and perhaps too, shall be blogged….