Crossing the Border and Round the Lake

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Before we start, all the pictures are of round Baikal, the last photos of Mongolia are on my iPad and it's too much of an effort to dig it out of my bag.





Ulaanbaatar train station at 6:30am is a cold and dark place, especially when you have to wait an hour for the bus. I say bus, it was actually quite a nice coach. And, I shouldn't complain about being there so early, I was given a free ride by the man who fixed the light bulb in my hostel room.

Mongolia; the land where every car is a taxi, which is fortunate, especially in the wild where transport is hard to come by. My friend at the Ger had to get a lift with a woman when it turned out there was no bus back in the afternoon, no charge. The Mongolians like to help people, ply us with tea and give us free lifts.

But, back to the bus.

It was nearly full, mainly with Russian Buryats (the indigenous people of the Republic of Buryatia, of which Ulan Ude is the capital city), Mongol people who live on the east side of Lake Baikal. There were also a few other Russians (Slavs* see notes at the bottom), some Mongolians, and me.

The toilet stops on the Mongolian side were... I'm not going into too much detail, but if you've ever been to Leed's Music Festival and been to the long pits next to the red zone campsite, you'll have some idea of what I experienced. A woman got on the bus and began selling clothes as though we were at a market. I picked up a nice pair of socks, possibly made from camel hair, I'm not rightly sure. We stopped off in the border town for some lunch, I went off on a walkabout and found some pigs snuffling in the dirt. We started the border crossing about quarter past one.

It went pretty smoothly, an hour each side. Sukhbaatar and Kyakhta. On each side, we had to take all our bags off the bus to go through immigration one by one. Our bags were scanned, we were metal-detected, and headed through passport control. The Mongolian passport control man asking me lots of questions, because apparently I don't look like the photograph in my passport. The Russian woman stamped me straight away (blue stamps in Kyakhta!), and a German Shepherd had a good sniff round our baggage (dog, that is).

Within miles of crossing the border, instead of the steppe, we were travelling through coniferous forests, the occasional bare tree betraying winter. The Gers stop quite suddenly and are replaced by Siberia's wooden houses. The roads are paved, which was a lovely treat. It's strange thinking back to my negative comments about Russian roads from when I lived in Tver, but compared to Mongolia's tracks, anything paved felt very pleasant.

I made friends with a Buryat woman called Oksana who was sat across from me. When we got to Ulan Ude, she took it upon herself to make enquiries on my behalf. She pointed me in the wrong direction, but it was nice of her all the same. I didn't need a taxi, the bus dropped us off right by Lenin's head and I only needed to walk to the north of the square (a little bit tricky to work out north in the dark after a lot of winding streets). The hostel was very comfortable, in an old soviet building, much like an obzheshitye*, but the people running it were very lovely, and I got talking to an English girl and American guy who were getting the bus back to Mongolia (and who I managed to swap some Mongolian money for Euros).

The following morning I got up and walked to the train station to get my tickets to Irkutsk. I had a chat with a local in the hostel (he brought up the Zombie apocalypse but I don't think he was prepared for my very well thought-out plan I already have in mind), then got a taxi with all my things to the train station. The train was late arriving but set off on time.

Plaskarti is the Russian train's third class, I have been on it before when it has been crammed full of people (Tver to Peters), but this time there weren't very many of us. I got talking to the two women in my compartment, a Russian woman, and an Azerbaijani student studying in Irkutsk. It felt very good to be speaking in Russian, being understood and understanding. We talked about music, films, literature, politics, geography, religion, and travelling in our seven hours together.

For the most part, we skirted round the lake. Deep blue waters on one side, forest covered mountains on the other. Every so often there was snow on the ground. People were fishing in the lake. There were boats. At the narrower points you could see the far shore, but for the most part, the water just went on.

I arrived in Irkutsk, again in the dark, and got a taxi to the hostel. It's fairly nice, two dorm rooms, a large kitchen and a sitting room. The staff are nice enough, and as always in hostels frequented by backpackers, lots of friendly people who have lots of advice of what to see and where to go. Today is my rest day. I am going to do nothing except relax and recover. I have until Friday in Irkutsk, then I am off to Ekaterinburg... two and a half days on a train. I can't wait!





*In Russian there are two words for 'Russian': russkiye and rossiyane. The first refers to the ethnic group (Eastern Slavs), and the second refers to citizenship of Russia. So, it is possible to be both russkiye and rossiyane, only russkiye (ethnically Russian, but a citizen of another country), and only rossiyane (for example, ethnically Buryat, with Russian citizenship). (interesting little linguistic info for you... well I find it interesting).

*Obzheshitye, Russian version of student halls.

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