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Published: August 3rd 2011
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Photo 10
First sight of Baikal waiting for the ferry Half way through my trip, time to do some statistics :
• 45 days have passed
• 18 places visited
• 53 people met
o With 10 I spoke mostly English
o With 1 German
o With 1 Swiss German
I guess you can do the math – that’s a lot of impressions and information! So for the next two weeks I’ll switch from Russian to mainly English and change my status from traveler to tourist 😉 Danny is coming up from Switzerland to give me company for two weeks around Lake Baikal 😊
The train ride from Krasnoyarsk to Irkutsk can be summarized with ‘кушай, кушай, кушай‘– eat, eat, eat’ – Irina made sure from the start that everyone knows everyone in our compartment. So we had Irina travelling to Zabaikalsk for holidays, Piotr returning home to Chita from visiting his daughter in Shushenskoe
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Baikal impressions and Lisa visiting her aunt in Irkutsk for holidays. While Piotr made us try probably all of his home-made food that his daughter packed for him, the conversations turned around the beauty of each of our home towns – I guess no matter where and how far you travel your home will always be your home 😊
Once arrived to Irkutsk I squeezed myself with my big backpack into the full bus to the airport – in Irkutsk you pay the bus driver once you get out, which meant that everyone has to get through the full bus to the front to pay and exit the bus… not gonna comment on it 😊 While waiting for Danny to arrive, I enjoyed blini and wireless in the airport café. Apart from the fact that the airport looks like a train station, I thought it was funny that you exit into the arrival hall without your luggage – once they are ready they open some other doors for you to go back in to claim your luggage. Then when exiting the baggage claim hall some lady checks that you grabbed
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Lake Baikal impressions the right luggage 😉 I guess it’s true, in every other airport you could just grab whatever luggage you like and walk away with it – on top of that it creates employment !
We caught a marshrutka to the hostel – I told the driver where we needed to get out, as the marshrutkas just drive their route and whenever you want to get out somewhere you have to scream . Turns out that we had to cross like half of the city, no space to put your luggage anywhere except for your knees – but I guess for 12 roubles you cannot complain 😉 The girl in the hostel was really sweet, very eager to explain you everything and very motivated to speak German . Being slightly jetlagged Danny took a rest before we hit the city.
Despite the fact that Irkutsk is the
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Baikal impressions closest big city from Lake Baikal and therefore one of the most popular stops on the Trans-Siberian railway, for me, Irkutsk is the messiest city I’ve seen so far in Russia. The main street, Ulitsa Karla Marxa is pretty quiet
the areas around however, especially where the market is located are much more crowded and it’s very hard to find anything – took us quite a while to find a supermarket to buy some products or just a simple café to eat something. We also didn’t quite grasp the public transport system – it was super easy to get from the hostel to the center, but somehow the buses and marshrutkas seem to run in circles, we never quite figured out how to get back from the center to the hostel, so we got lost on both evenings trying to get back – well, this way Danny at least saw how Russian suburbs look like 😉
After two days in Irkutsk we were ready for the magic Lake Baikal 😊 We were told that minibuses run at 10am and 12pm Photo 42
Lake Baikal impressions to Olkhon Island – we got their by 10am – until our minibus was full it was however past 12pm – can’t tell anymore when exactly we left! Patience is definitely one thing that I’ve learned in Russia 4 minutes delayed and people actually start getting nervous if the announcement isn’t made 😊]. For 4h it was a pretty smooth ride through Russian nature passing by plenty of small villages. The last 2h were pretty much free style driving on dirt roads – every car seemed to know a faster way, at least there were plenty of different lanes, not quite understandable which one is the real ‘street’. A relatively short wait for the ferry allowed us to enjoy for the first time the view on the deep blue Lake Baikal – and we also realized pretty quickly that swimming in it will probably be comparable to our 10th of April dive into Lac Leman in Lausanne… brrrrr 😉
We stayed in Olkhon’s main town Khuzir – some 100 houses, a couple of souvenir yurts, a few restaurants and some shops to buy drinks and food. We
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Lake Baikal impressions booked ourselves into Nikita’s – that seemed the place to be on Olkhon. It’s kind of like a tiny village of wooden houses for sleeping, eating, banja, … quite well done I have to say. Therefore it’s probably also the most touristic place on the island – given my new status I didn’t mind . The price you pay includes full board; tours can be booked there, so basically everything you need is right in front of your face – for once nothing to organize 😊 The rest of the village didn’t seem to be so much captured by the tourism yet
– the infrastructure still looks like from the times when Olkhon was still living from its fish farming industry – these factories are pretty much all shut down nowadays.
One of the days we decided to take a tour up to very northern tip of the island. A 4WD minivan packed with a Russian driver, 4 German tourists, 3 Photo 37
Baikal impressions Frenchies, 1 Swiss German , Danny and myself made its way on bumpy roads up the north with a couple of breaks along the coast. I tried to concentrate on the beautiful nature outside and ignore the talking of the German girl next to us… not always quite successfully – she seemed to have travelled up from Mongolia and didn’t know any better than to complain about the train ride . As for the beauty of the nature – check the pictures 😊 Once up in the north our driver cooked us a delicious lunch – Baikal fish soup, tomato/cucumber salad and tea with pryaniki for dessert – the meal was definitely Russian 😊
One more important thing to mention about Olkhon: Danny & I did go swimming in Lake Baikal!!!
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EdVallance
Edward Adrian-Vallance
your blogs are always full of interesting and true observations about Russia - keep it up! You say "check the pictures" though - where are they?! I think only one of your blogs has had photos so far...