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Come on in Hi All, I can't believe it's been 8 days since my last post. We've done so much in the last week - I'm dreading how long it's going to take to write this blog (it doesn't matter now as its only costs 50 cent an hour here compared to 10 Euro in Siberia, that's why it has taken 8 days to update).
We boarded the train in Moscow and were excited/nervous about being couped up in a small cabin for nearly 4 days straight, we needn't have worried, as we quickly opened up an Irish Pub in our dainty cabin and for most of the 4 days it was home to 8 -- 12 drunks, much to the annoyance of our carriage attendant. Maeve did up a sign which we hung up, it announced we were open for business and willing to cater for all as long as you BYOB (Bring Your Own Booze). We named it Brendan B's after Brendan Behan famous Irish writer and Nobel prize winner and distant relative of Richard our Ozzie comrade. It didn't take long for a few heads to appear in the door and make themselves comfortable. We ended up being the only Irish
Full House
Room for Everybody in our Irish pub but we had some Russians, Kiwi's, English, Dutch and some we weren't sure of. We got to sleep at 4 the first morning and 7 the next two. It was amazing to watch the sun rise over the Siberian landscape, a highlight of the trip so far.
Its a bit of a mind bending experience trying to deal with the time differences as we crossed 5 time zones in 3 days so basically you get up 2 hours later than the day before, assuming you get up at the same time as the day before. Basically getting up at 10 am becomes 3 pm by day 3. But then to keep up with this you have to go to bed 2 hours earlier, so going to bed at 10 pm becomes 5pm by day 3. So in your mind by day 3 you're getting up and then going to bed 2 hours later for a full nights sleep.
That's the theory any way in reality we stuck to Moscow time which really fecked us all up when we arrived in Irkutsk, what a wierd day. We tried to be sensible on our last night on the
Still going Strong
5.20AM Sunrise and Party still in Full Swing, the mosquitos had a good time too. train and got to bed early, knowing that we'd be getting up at 4am to get off the train. We went to bed at 10pm-ish local time, which was only 5pm Moscow time. We really didn't sleep until about 3am local time 10pm Moscow time, so we got 1 hours sleep and had to get up. We were hanging badly and up to this point we were glad we'd ceased trading in Brendan B's for the last night. That was until our guide picked us up and brought us into Irkutsk city centre and announced we were to start our walking tour of the city, at 5.22AM!!!!!!!!!! We were after 4 days in a train, with loads of drinking, not much sleep, no showers and body clocks that were well out of synch. We were going to ask for a 5 minute break while we knocked back the half a bottle of Vodka we had salvaged, you couldn't possibly expect us to do this sober. Lets just say it wasn't worth getting out of bed for, we walked around this average and pretty non-descript city to look at churches we couldn't go into, walk by a power plant we didn't
Trainspotter Richard
He swears he hasn't got an Anorak, but i'm not convinced want to go near and looked at museums that wouldn't be open for at least 3 hours.
We moved on to, unimpressed to Listvyanka a small fishing village on the shores of Lake Baikal, the oldest lake in the world, with one-fifth of the worlds fresh water, that expands by 1cm per year due to the 2000+ earthquakes a year. It was a nice little place and we were glad of showers and a bed, albeit 10 hours after we thought we couldn't go on any further. We walked the 10 minutes we were told it would take to get to the village and we're still 50 minutes away. We met up with Anthony, a travel guidebook writer, for Lonely Planet if my memory serves me correct, and had great chat with him. He's in Siberia for a few months as he's writing a cultural guide of Siberia. He'd been there 6 weeks and was glad to have some english speaking people to chat and have a beer with.
The next day we set off for a fishing trip on a boat on Lake Baikal. Richard and Ger are, or were, big into their fishing (Maeve and I set off
St. Petersburg
Peter and Paul Fortress on our maiden fishing voyage)and I thought it might be good blog fodder. We went along with a Russian man, his son 12 and a friend 15, all claiming to be accomplished fishernen. After over an hour 7 of us caught just 4 fish. Maeve caught all 4 of the making the boys look a bit useless. On the way back we had nice fish soup, thanks Maeve, and sat back eating soup, drinking beer and enjoying the scenery and subshine, a really nice day. It didn't end there though, we met up with Anthony again, a few Russian Guys and some others, before we knew it we were all heading off to the Siberian local fishing village Disco. Great craic was had by all, Maeve provided one third of the sum total of the local talent in the disco, I say local as rumour was spreading round of her great fishing attributes and they were claiming her as one of their own. We got home by 3am and stayed in bed nearly all the next day, needless to say there was not much to report that day.
We left Siberia on Thursday for a day and a half on
the train to Mongolia
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