Siberia - 10,000 Miles !!!!

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January 31, 2008

10,000 Miles !!!!!

We are in a small town on the northern edge of Lake Baikal. With a depth of 5,371 ft. it is the deepest freshwater lake in the world, and it is frozen solid. Not quite solid enough the locals say to get across it by jeep to a set of hot springs on the other side but if we stayed a few more weeks it would be - maybe next time. Lake Baikal is not only the deepest freshwater lake in the world but also the largest, holding about 20% of the world’s total supply of freshwater!

It is very cold here - 28 below at night here, Celsius (that’s about -19 Fahrenheit). Of course in the sun during the day it warms up to a balmy 8-10 below Celsius. Luckily we are all set with our local felt boots, and matching down climber jackets....

Since the last update we took a break in our train travel with an overnight trip to Moscow, Red Square and the Kremlin are sights words can’t describe but the pictures will when I get a chance to send them out. Unfortunately with the quality and availability of Internet service we have seen that will probably after the trip.

We boarded the Trans Siberian railroad bound for the Pacific Coast over 10,000 miles to the east. We had our first 3 days & nights to ourselves in our cabin for 4 and didn’t realize how good we had it until the first of many companions joined us.

The first were two Uzbekistani's who couldn’t have been better. They were so nice and spoke some English(maybe 10 words) which at this point was great!!! They graciously shared their food with us local bread and meat in a plastic shopping bag...mmm delicious!!! Then they left and we had some more companions who spoke absolutely no English, but in the end that didn’t matter as we communicated via hand signals, shared food, and contently stared out our window as Siberia rolled by. We passed lots of small Siberian villages with quaint little cabins and cottages, lots of logging mills, one at every town almost, and all the locals in fur hats.

After 5 days of staring out the window at the same but beautiful scenery we decided we did not want to go all the way to the Pacific coast so we got off earlier, 6 days into the transcontinental trip, and connected to another train line(BAM) which is travels even further north than the Trans Siberian!!!

As we traveled north the weather turned lots colder, we went thru a mountain range and the temps dropped, and are still low. We headed back west on this BAM train and are now in Severobaikalsk, a small town on Lake Baikal.

As we have moved further away from the larger cities we find that no one speaks English, maybe a hello but nothing else. We have coped with it using a combination of sign language and the few Russian words we now know. We know enough that we can buy train tickets and get groceries and food in Russian. We had lots of train time to practice with the locals, and have beefed up our essential Russian vocabulary.

While on the train we got to order our first of many meals off an dull Russian menu from a server who didn’t speak any English(the secret is to point to something and then be open and adventurous about what you will be getting and eating). We also had our one big night of passing vodka around with a group of Russians in a room no bigger than most of our closets, and there were at least 8 of us in it!!!!

We are headed back down south tonight to a spa village called Arshan which is about 3 hours from here, this in route to Mongolia which is not far away. The ice festival we want to go to in Mongolia is Feb 12 and 13th.

I hope everyone is doing well, we probably won’t be able to update until Mongolia??

Ned

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