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Published: August 28th 2013
This is embarrassing. The Lake Baikal trip was a big failure and I did not see a Baikal seal!
Also this is a very long post because I've been writing it day by day, so before you start reading go get some slippers, a packet of biscuits and a cup of coffee (or a pot of tea if you're that way inclined).
Lake Baikal has a lot of superlatives attached to it. It is the deepest lake in the world at 1642 metres (and apparently there is 7000 metres of sediment below that to the actual floor of the lake!). It is 636km long and 79km wide and thus has the largest surface area of any body of freshwater in Asia (31,722 km2). In terms of volume it is the largest freshwater lake in the world, containing 20% of all the world’s free (unfrozen) fresh water. It is also considered to be the world’s oldest freshwater lake, at about 25 million years old, so it is not surprising to learn that over 80% of the species inhabiting the lake are endemic. And it is one of those endemic species that I was here to see, the Baikal seal or
nerpa. The seal is in fact the entire reason I went to Russia.
The Baikal seal is a tiny wee thing, little more than four feet in length at its biggest and as chubby as a baby Sumo wrestler. How they ended up in Lake Baikal is a bit of a mystery because the lake is literally surrounded by mountains and is a couple of thousand kilometres from the nearest ocean. Have a look at a map and see where Lake Baikal is, smack in the middle of Russia, right above Mongolia......personally I reckon aliens did it.
The bus ride from Ulan Ude to Ust-Barguzin used to take seven hours but they have improved (part of) the road so it only took me four and a half hours. The first two and a half hours are easy, over a smooth sealed road; the next two hours are not. Imagine a dirt motorcross track taken at high speed by a mini-bus and you've got the idea. At least Russian mini-buses are built for tall people and have a lot of head clearance – the ones in southeast Asia are tiny and every bump smacks my head off the ceiling.
Ust-Barguzin is more or less entirely surrounded by coniferous forest, but it was not quite what I was expecting. It has a couple of sort-of sealed roads running through it but otherwise the entire village just has sand tracks for roads, along which every so often a herd of cows or some goats will amble on their way to find a new pasture. For some reason almost every single house has a large pile of either timber or logs outside the fence. I don't know where all the wood comes from – oh wait, yes I do! Half the people in town wear camouflage gear; it's either the fashion or they're trying to blend in. On the plus side there are white wagtails
everywhere!! (On the down side, by the third day I was sick of white wagtails.They are really cute but omnipresent to the point of distraction). It was while going to take a photo of one of the wagtails that I discovered my camera has decided to sulk. When I turned it on the screen came up with a message saying that it cannot access the card so to take it out and put it back in, or
format the card, or get a new card. This is the card I've been using since the start of the trip so it should work. I tried putting it in and out a few times, but nothing. I can't format the card without losing all the photos already on there. When I got back to where I was staying I tried my spare card and the message was the same. I tried formatting it but it came up with a message saying the card cannot be formatted! So the upshot of all that is that the only camera I had to use at Lake Baikal was my little point-and-shoot, and therefore no photos of wildlife, only some of the lake itself.
Most tourists who go to see Lake Baikal stay on Olkhon Island on the west side of the lake, accessed from the town of Irkutsk. I picked Ust-Barguzin instead because firstly I'd read that there's not a lot of wildlife on Olkhon Island, secondly because Ust-Barguzin is right next to the Zabaikalsky National Park, thirdly because there are a couple of nearby islands (the Ushkanie Islands) where the seals haul out which can be visited by boat, and
fourthly because I'd found on the internet a reference to a guesthouse owned by one Alexander Beketov who was an officer with the national park and therefore should be ideal for information on where to go to find animals. As I've mentioned before, the requirements for Russian tourist visas for New Zealanders include a full itinerary with all transport and accommodation booked in advance. Because of this my stay at Alexander's place had been arranged way back at the start of the year. I had shown the bus driver the address in Ust-Barguzin so he dropped me right at the door, a woman came out and said my name, I said yes, and she says they are full!!! Just to make that clear, the room had been booked about seven months ago, she knew my name as soon as I got out of the bus and so was obviously expecting me, and yet there was no room! The woman didn't speak a lot of English, so a girl came out and said a car was coming to take me to another homestay because they were full. I questioned as to why, but her English wasn't up to detailed explanations, so
Muskrat (Ondatra zibethica)
best I could get with only the little camera working:(she got Alexander's wife on the phone who did speak quite good English. I asked her why there was no room when I had booked it well in advance but all I got was something along the lines of “I know you arranged it but we are full.” That's it, no apologies or anything. So I have to say that I wouldn't recommend using the services of Alexander Beketov if going to Ust-Barguzin. Pretty poor show really. The homestay I ended up at was quite nice but they didn't speak more than a couple of words of English which meant it was very difficult trying to sort out how to do anything. (I honestly tried some Russian but I just can't get my tongue around the pronunciations, and every time I wanted to try and say something all that would come into my head were Indonesian words).
I went for a walk to Lake Baikal which was an hour away from the homestay. (I like saying that: “I went for a walk to Lake Baikal”). The lake's a bit of an odd one. It was cool seeing it but at the same time it's just a sandy beach, waves,
Muskrat (Ondatra zibethica)
at the Natural History Museum in Ulan Ude and a horizon. It's like if you came to New Zealand and were really looking forward to seeing the Pacific Ocean but when you get there it's like “okay, seen it, now what” because it just looks like any other ocean. I was expecting a stony beach actually but it's all sand, just like an ocean beach (I found some stony beaches later). The coniferous forest along the shore didn't seem to hold much, apart for loads of wagtails and enormous ferocious mosquitoes which feed on you straight through your clothing. A small wetland behind the beach was also pretty lacking in birds, just a common greenshank, a couple of grey herons and a group of greater scaup. At the end of the beach was a large flock of gulls which I spent some time studying and decided were all Mongolian and common gulls (which a book I found later on the birds of Lake Baikal said were the two common gulls of the lake, so yay for me). There were two sanderlings running with the waves along the beach, which surprised me as I didn't expect to see them here. In the marsh nearby was a small flock of
Wolverine (Gulo gulo)
at the Natural History Museum in Ulan Ude what had to have been Temminck's stints but I only saw them in flight so I didn't count those ones.
In the evening Alexander came round to the place I was staying to see what excursions I wanted to do in the park. I was a bit worried that access to the park was only allowed with a guide but that turned out to not be the case which was good. So the only thing I really needed was the boat trip to the Ushkanie Islands where the seals hang out. It turned out that the boat trip costs, wait for it, 15,000 Roubles – that's roughly NZ$600, so far outside my budget (and expectations!) that it was nothing but a tiny dot in the far distance! I didn't even have enough cash in my wallet to cover that on top of the cost of the homestay etc. He also said that he'd been out there two days ago with some people and there were no seals. Apparently also the seals can
only be found on these few little islands. I know that to not be the case at all, but that is what everyone said, and they certainly
Baikal seals (Pusa sibirica)
at the Natural History Museum in Ulan Ude weren't in any of the places I got to look at. The boat leaves from the other side of the park (at least ten hours away on foot) and not from Ust-Barguzin itself which is frustrating because otherwise I could have just popped down every morning to see if there was a boat of people going; instead I was reliant on Alexander telling me when/if some people are going who I could join in with. I'm really getting why there's no information on wildlife-spotting in Russia except on tours, because it's pretty much impossible to do anything worthwhile independently unless you speak fluent Russian and have very deep pockets. Most foreign tourists just come to Russia for the Trans-Siberian railway trip and don't stray far beyond the key points, so you don't normally see anybody but domestic Russian tourists anywhere else.
The Zabaikalsky National Park border is directly north of the town. In between, directly on the north edge of Ust-Barguzin, is a river and there is no bridge. Instead there's a barge which takes vehicles across. If you're on foot it is free, but the first crossing isn't until 8am which is rather late if you're a birder
Grey wolf (Canis lupus)
at the Natural History Museum in Ulan Ude (and even more so if you still have two kilometres to walk from the river just to get to the park entrance). At the entrance I paid for four days of entries (70 Roubles per day). The woman there spoke some English and was extremely surprised I was from New Zealand – apparently I'm the first one ever to go there. I dare say I'm probably the first foreign tourist of
any nationality to ever turn up alone on foot at the gate! I asked her about the seals and she said they could only be found on the Ushkanie Islands and not anywhere on the main coast.
Walking isn't the ideal way to do Zabaikalsky; from the entrance there is a 25km sand road through patchy coniferous forest which seemed largely devoid of animals, and then there's a taiga-covered mountain at the end of a peninsula, which is where all the wildlife is supposed to be (“many many bears” the woman at the entrance had said). I've never been anywhere with such confident predators as brown bears before and I was a bit nervous to start with, being on foot and having a whole lot of cooked chicken
Red fox (Vulpes vulpes)
at the Natural History Museum in Ulan Ude in my bag, but I soon got over that. Mainly because there wasn't much in the way of animal life to be seen at all. I didn't even get as far as the end of the sand road because after about five or six kilometres the world decided it would be fun to start raining. I put on my rain poncho and kept going but it got worse and then the wind kicked in as well. You feel silly giving up when you've gone to the other side of the world to look for stuff but at the same time you know it's pointless trudging through a storm. It's not fun and there are no animals, so I turned around and headed back. On the bright side, before the rain started I did see two Siberian red squirrels so that's something – I may only be on two mammals for the trip so far, but both of them are new for me! I saw red squirrels and Siberian chipmunks every day that I was in the park.
The next day was more productive because it wasn't raining, but still not many birds. I guess things can only get better
Siberian musk deer (Moschus moschiferus)
at the Natural History Museum in Ulan Ude from now on though (he says with fingers crossed). I got a lift from the park entrance to about halfway along the sand road. The condition of this road isn't so obvious when you're walking it but in a vehicle it is extraordinarily bad. It doesn't have potholes, it has meteorite craters! And the Russians tend to just drive at the same speed no matter what. I think I would have preferred walking to be honest. The place I got dropped off turned out to be a relatively good spot. Spotted nutcrackers were quite prevalent all through the pines here –
outstanding birds those ones! They were one of the birds I was really hoping to see while here and I wasn't disappointed by them. Quite a lot larger than I had thought they would be as well (I was expecting something about the size of a starling!). Behind the pines was a narrow strip of boggy grassland, over which was quartering a female hen harrier who was paying so much attention to the ground looking for prey that she apparently didn't even notice me until almost right over top and then she veered off with what can only be described as a startled expression! After that I popped over to the beach just in case. Not far away some juvenile gulls were tugging at a black shape on the drift-line. I went to have a look and it turned out to be a dead Baikal seal! I knew the size of these seals from their measurements in books, but I hadn't really grasped just how small they were. They are seriously tiny! Seeing the dead one made me even more anxious to see live ones, but despite scanning the lake surface there was nothing. I got another lift from a passing car to the end of the sand road where there's a track up the mountain. The beach here is all stones and rocks, perfect for seals to haul out, but no. After spending some futile time watching the water for seals, I took a wander through the forest up the track (proper forest, not the pines-on-sand along the sand road) but there wasn't even a whisper of birds to be heard. Everything really is very quiet here.
Walking back to Ust-Barguzin scratched up some more new birds, including three merlins (little falcons, not wizards) and I also finally managed to get a good look at my first northern raven! I knew they were here because I'd been hearing their calls the last two days but the only ones I'd seen had either been flying or too far off for me to accept them (there are also Oriental carrion crows here and I wanted to be clear on what I was seeing). Cool birds. Also nice was what turned out to be a white-crowned penduline tit which shot across the track and landed inside a shrub where I could still see it. I got a really good look at it, noted all its ID features, thought “that should be easy to identify” – and then couldn't find anything like it in the field guide! Lake Baikal falls just west of the limits of the East Asia field guide and north of the limits of the China field guide so neither of them work 100%!((MISSING)I'm only using the East Asia guide for now because the illustrations in the China guide are awful!). I figured the bird was just one of those ones which would have to be left unknown, but luckily I later found a book on Baikal wildlife at the homestay which had a pretty good painting of the exact thing I saw.
After about 20km a van stopped to see if I wanted a lift but I figured there was only five or so kilometres to go to the park gate, so I may as well just finish walking it. Also there were still a couple of little lakes to pass. One had a bunch of ducks way out in the middle, too far away to identify, but I accidentally flushed a group of about ten small sandpipers (and one common greenshank) from the shore. They little ones flew in a swirl out over the water, swept back and forth a few times, and then settled back on the shore maybe forty feet away. I knew from watching them flying they must be Temminck's stints but once they landed I got to have a good look at them to confirm. A couple of grey wagtails made a welcome change from the ubiquitous white wagtails. On the other lake was a female northern shoveller, unmistakeable with her huge bill. So all in all a better day than before.
I usually end up walking long distances when I'm on my travels but to be honest I don't actually like walking. If there's an easier free/cheap way of getting somewhere I'll take it. I had noticed that Natasha had a bicycle outside the house and I thought that might make it easier getting in and out of the park on my third visit. (In case of confusion, Natasha is the lady who owns the homestay and not some random five year old, so the bicycle was an adult-sized bike not a little pink one with ribbons on the handlebars. Honest). Russian bicycles all seem to be the same, none of them have suspension, gears or even brakes. I guess the truck that stops suddenly in front of you is your brakes. They do have a handy basket on the front though to put your water bottle and lunch box in. It turned out that the bicycle was not my greatest idea ever. The first several kilometres of the road is covered in rain-worn ridges which are like continuous judder-bars. Then you get to the part where the road dissolves into a series of potholes/sinkholes/black holes. And
then the last third of the 25km stretch is a mix of rocks and compacted sand which is like riding over a rocky stream bed. On a mountain bike with big fat tyres it would be no problem, on a Russian babushka bike not so much. For a good period of the ride you're barely going any faster than walking speed. You also need to keep an eye on the areas of soft sand because if a wheel hits them it slews off sideways and the bike stops abruptly. So not much time saved on travelling but it did take the hurt away from my feet – and transferred it to every other part of my body, especially (most painfully) the part most connected to the bicycle seat! I don't think I want to see another bicycle for quite a while!
Bird-wise this day was pointless. Arctic warbler was the only new bird for the day, and no nutcrackers at all despite seeing over a dozen yesterday so I guess I was lucky then. But I was mainly going to look for seals from the beaches anyway – with a complete lack of success I may add. I did see a diver (for Americans, a loon; for non-birders, a pointy-billed ducky-looking bird) which was cool because it's the first one I've ever seen, but it was in silhouette on the lake so I couldn't tell which species it was. While watching the lake surface I did some pondering on the Baikal seal and came up with some suppositions. Firstly it has enormous eyes in proportion to its head, and thus I suspect it is a deep-diving seal (remember the lake is the deepest in the world), feeding mainly at depth like the similarly-huge-eyed elephant seal. Secondly, leading on from that, I suspect it is again like the elephant seal in being largely pelagic (or rather, “pelagic”, given that it is in a lake and not the sea!), mainly coming to shore just for breeding but otherwise spending most of its life out in the open water. And thirdly I suspect it's probably not a seal that is normally seen on the main shorelines of the lake anyway because until recently the whole lake was surrounded by bears and a Baikal seal is exactly the right size to fit inside a bear's picnic basket. That would explain why I keep getting told that the seals can only be seen on those few small islands, because if they do come to land it is on the few offshore islands rather than the main coast, but most of the time the majority of the seal population is far off-shore in deep water where they can't be seen. Now all of that may be complete nonsense but it is what I came up with while staring at the empty lake surface. In keeping with my ponderings, it is interesting that the seals breed in the winter when the entire lake is frozen over and the bears are hibernating, with the baby seals being left on the ice next to the breathing holes.
On my fifth day I decided to give the national park a miss and just walk to the lake area nearest the village. If I was only going to be watching the water for seal heads I didn't need to walk for hours and hours to do it when there was a closer spot. Five hours of lake-watching revealed nothing, which I have to say did not surprise me one bit. Only joy for the day was an osprey and a pair of Siberian jays (which are fantastic birds to watch!). I did see several boats with outboard motors coming and going from the river mouth along the coast a bit, so when I went back to town I took a detour to the river crossing area thinking maybe I could rustle up a cheaper boat for myself to take me to the seal islands. There are some stalls by the water selling food and knick-knacks so using my skills of “pointing at map” I asked around if there was any way to get a boat from there to the islands, but the only answers I got were that the boat for the islands goes only from the other side of the park, so no luck at all. I also tried in the little restaurant by the jetty and even at the town's hotel up the road (who gave the impression of “why are you asking us about a boat? We're a hotel”).
Last day at Lake Baikal: things had gotten weird at the homestay the last couple of days. I'm certain they didn't actually like me being there at all which is weird because normally people love me where-ever I stay, even if there are language barriers. There was an uncomfortable atmosphere but I really have no idea what it was all about. I spent part of the morning trying again at the jetty for a boat, then walked to the national park for one last visit. I saw another pair of Siberian jays; funny thing but I always saw these in pairs and every pair I saw was accompanied by a white-backed woodpecker. It was a bit odd. (Also odd is that I keep seeing white-backed woodpeckers everywhere but no other species!). I stopped at the little lakes where I'd seen some good birds on the other visits, and was lucky enough to arrive there just as a huge white-tailed sea eagle flew past. Magnificent sight. There were some Eurasian teal on the water and on the edge, bizarrely, a ruddy turnstone with the stints and greenshanks! Now that was a wader I
really didn't expect to see at Lake Baikal! I also finally worked out that the flycatchers I'd been seeing here and there were female taiga flycatchers (for some reason most of the birds I see are female-plumaged, which makes working out what they are difficult when they are flycatchers and finches! It'd be so much easier if I could see a male every now and then). Best of all though, while checking out a small reedy pond I spotted a pair of muskrats feeding amongst the rushes! They are cute critters. I spent a couple of hours scanning the lake for seals but of course nothing. I had been hoping there would be some sort of eleventh hour reprieve, and somehow I'd see a seal after all.
Back at the homestay in the evening there was a phone-call for me, a woman speaking English saying that I could go to the Ushkanie Islands tomorrow for 12,000. It was still too much but she said she would see if she could find another person to make it 6000 each and she would call me back. I thought this might be the last-minute save I was hoping for. I have no idea who the woman was, I thought it was Alexander's wife but it wasn't. Natasha had given me a note with the amount I owed for the room and was getting very impatient, pressuring me to say whether I was going on the bus back to Ulan Ude tomorrow or not. I was trying to explain that I was waiting for the woman to call back so I would know whether I was staying another night or not. Then things went all pear-shaped. It's all far too complicated and messy to write down, but the end result was I went on the 6am bus the next morning and there was no trip to the Ushkanie Islands.
So that was the Baikal trip. I saw some nice birds and two new mammals but the whole point of the trip, the Baikal seal, did not eventuate. This was particularly aggravating because of all the animals I hoped to see on this trip the Baikal seal was the only one that I thought would be a dead cert! I had a whole bunch of issues with people at the two homestays in Ust-Barguzin (Alexander's and Natasha's) but I don't know what that was all about; part of it was probably my imagination due to frustrations over not being able to get to the islands, but most of it was certainly real. Perhaps it was because I wasn't Russian, or perhaps just because they
were Russian, I don't know. Still, even when a trip goes bad it is still good, if that makes sense, because I still see new places and new animals, even if not everything (or anything!) works out the way it's supposed to. I doubt I'll ever come back to Russia, but if I do then I'll do what I don't like to do, and organise a tour. It seems to be the only way to get anything done here. There just isn't any infrastructure for independent animal-spotters here. Even somewhere as undeveloped as Indonesia is simple to do independently, or even somewhere as expensive as Japan still seems to have a good enough system to allow independent travelling. Russia, quite the opposite.
Now I've got a couple of days in Ulan Ude and then I'm off to Mongolia. If the trip so far is anything to go by, don't expect too much!! I've bought a new memory card for the camera which works, and I've just been to the local natural history museum which was cool but also kind of depressing because of all the mammals there which I didn't see when I was at Lake Baikal!
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Peter
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boat prices
At luangbajo a week ago they wanted 800 US for a speed boat to Komodo Island.........has the world gone totally mad? We ended up paying 550 between the 4 of us.....felt a bit useless to someone that is used to seeing huge monitor lizzards anyhow.......if it wasn't for the yellow-crested cockatoos I'd give it a miss......