Frozen water

---

Again another lye-in, at this rate I am never going to see this effin lake. The owner came to my rescue though, he offered to take me on a personal tour for 1500 roubles (about 30 quid), at first I said no but then I thought what the hell, it makes it easier, it was expensive but he offered me the same tour for 2500 when I arrived, I think he wasn't doing much. It is expensive being on your own sometimes.

Anyway we drove the 60km to Listvyanka village (which in itself sucks arse) but I must admit the lake was fantastic, I didn’t know what to expect but it was frozen, you were no longer allowed drive on it as it was thawing but you could walk on it (which I did), weird and to be honest quite scary. This lake is massive, I think it is 600km long and 60km wide. It also has this really cool bit where the thawed out river meets the frozen lake, I feel lucky though as it is due to thaw out completely in a week or two and then it would just look like another large lake.

I also had some of the local speciality smoked fish (called omul) which was really nice, my fingers still stink of fish though (after 7 washes)

This trip also gave me my first experience of Russian drivers, not something I want to repeat to often. In the 120km drive we saw 6 aftermaths of crashes (all of them happened that day), one of them was even a car that had flipped over.

Anyway back to the hostel we went, when we were almost back it started to snow (well what do I expect in Siberia?), I took a bit of a walk as it has been ages since I walked in snow. After I while I remembered that the stuff is also actually pretty cold so I made a hasty retreat back to the warm hostel.

---