Baikal area

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Baikal Lake Area

Hi Dear Friends!

Sorry for not writing so long, it's not because we have forgotten about you. Since our last entry we crossed from Europe to Asia and after our adventureous trip on the Trans Siberian we arrived to Irkutsk on 1 October. 4 nights, 3 days on the train sounds horrible, but actually was not that bad... we shared our cabin with 2 Russian guys, both on a 7 day trip to Vladivostok... ouch... one of them was a military pilot. We asked him why he did not fly on this long trip, he said he does not trust the Russian commercial airlines... maybe he likes to be in control??? We had some funny chats with him and his friend, he understood approx 20 %!o(MISSING)f what we said in English, but was very enthusiastic to share his opinion about WWII and some countries which the Russians dont like. His basic opinion could be summarized in three bacis points:
1) Mother Russia: PEACE
2) Germany = Hitler = Very Bad
3) Anybody home? (comment from our side: he stated this many times, not only to us, but we still don't know what is means, but it wasn't positive...)

Thanks God, the Netherlands and Hungary were not on his black list.... still he was convinced that we did not understand world history, so we decided to often change topic and talk about culture, etc... and to hide our vodka bottle as when we shared it with this guy, he turned back to the history topic all the time 😊

Irkutsk 1-2 October

Asian Russia is a lot different to European Russia in many aspects. You see much more Asian style faces, more Lada's and Niva's and very interestingly a lot of Japanese cars with right side steering wheels. Apparently the import of Japanese cars is a good business here... Upon arrival to the hostel from the train we fell into bed for a decent sleep and the next day we headed to Olkhon Island on the Baikal Lake.

Olkhon Island/Khoboy Cape 2-4 October

Amazing views, landscapes, crystal clear deep deep deep blue water (deepest lake of the world, deepest point 1637m and it contains 20%!o(MISSING)f the world's non-frozen fresh water), sunshine all over. We chose homestay so we spent 2 nights at Olga's home where we experienced the real Russian Banya several times. A bit more humid than its Finnish brother, and besides that you use perch branches to hit each other for better circulation...funny... we took a one day trip to the north cape of the island, where we further enjoyed the beautiful view, we stopped at some shamanic places and were served with great fish soup on the spot. And yes, the transportation on the island is limited to good old UAZ vans, which you can hardly see outside Russia anymore, except for some ex-communist countries like Hungary-countryside. These vans can cope with any landscape, not matter if you have the feeling the car almost turns around... similar to dune bashing if you have ever done it in the desert. But we could enjoy it for a full day 😉

Listvyanka/!Diving! 4-6 October

After Olkhon we decided to approach the lake from an other angle instead of spending more days in Irkutsk. We took a local bus to Listvyanka which is a small village on the shore, recently the favourite weekend venue for the Russian nouveau riche... (comment: the russian "nouveau riche" apparently still can't afford decent architects, as there was basically a competition going on on who makes the biggest building with the most towers... The funny thing is that it's neighboor could still be a simple guy living in a simple house, so the cute pink building turns pretty fast into a greyish/blackish something do to the smoke from the chimenys 😊, but we arrived there Sunday evening at the same time when these guys were queueing in the traffic jam towards Irkutsk to the opposite direction. Nice small touristic village, with famous Omul fish (similar to trout), we had it several times smoked, jummy! We wanted to arrange scubadiving in the lake, but as usual we were totally unprepared and naively hoped that on a Monday afternoon we would find an open diving centre on the spot who is ready to take us into the blue... well, it's not that easy... so no diving club was open, but we collected some phone numbers so started calling them from the local post office's old fashined telephone (our Russian mobile SIM did not find network....). At the end we contacted Andrej at 3 Dimensions diving club who agreed to take us for a dip the day after! So we extended our stay at Listvyanka with one more day and looked fwd to it! One problem we had to face though... Chris' size. Apparently the club did not have on stock double wet suit for someone of 2 meters height and boots for feet of 46... so Chris very sadly stayed on shore, reading his book in the sun with some beer, while I went for a lovely dive with Andrej. Probably only Alain & Patrice dove in the Stausee in Luxembourg among yourselves guys, so Alain& Patrice, this is for you: we did not need to use flashlight as visibility was perfect, approx 30 meters. Beautiful underwater vegetation, green grass at around 3-5 meters, and later at the drop off some funny green sponges. We went down till 18 meters at a 60 meter wall, water totally clear. Water temperature was 8C which is similar to Stausee, so no issues with cold. However my borrowed diving computer did not work... but my buddy was nice enough to show me his once in a while.

Ulaan Ude 7-9 October

We decided not to rush to Mongolia as our trip is booked only from 11 October, so we made a stopover to Ulaan Ude, which is East to the Baikal lake, approx 100 km north from the Mongolian border. We are staying in a hostel outside the city a bit inconvenient, but we are basically the only ones in the hostel (only hostel in town), so it's all right! Yesterday we went to see the Etnografic museum which has a great outdoor exhibition of typical Buriat villages from the neighbourhood from the last few centuries and some Hunni relics (yes, they are our ancestors my Hungarian friends, our people started from right here to migrate towards the Carpats). Spent there 3-4 hours wandering around and we also visited their animal park which is supposed to introduce us to the animals in the region. If you have ever been to an Eastern European Zoo then you can imagine how sad those bears, wolves, foxes and camels, etc were over there. Closed behind thick iron bars in extremely small places, very bad... so we did not spend there more than 10 minutes...
Today Chris had to stay at home as he got sick with sore throat. We decided that he stays in bed to make sure that he gets better by the time our migration starts in the Mongolian steppe on horses, etc in the cold. He is sleeping now... good boy, so it's my task to update the blog, which is all right! Today I went with a newly found Belgian friend to the local Buddhist village, which is the centre for Buddhism in Russia. This was my first experience with Buddhism, it was very interesting. We enrolled for a guided tour in English and were a bit surprised when we got 2 young lama-to-be's to be our guides. Well, looking at them (behaviour, seriousness) I could not really imagine they would ever become lamas, but I wished good luck for them. Their english was worse than my russian (which is really very basic) so Johan and I were not really happy, but probably the Gods noticed this and sent us a lady to replace the boys (they had to go to study) and she spoke fluent English so we got a better understanding of what's going on.. Apparently their 12th lama died in 1927 and 30 years after his death his body was exhumated. Well, nothing changed on his body, even though there was no balsaming or any other conservation used. However, he instructed his fellow monks in his final will to bury him in a special wooden box in lotus position.. and he is still sitting in this position after 80 years, his body/flesh still there on the skeleton... even researchers (among them ones from the Lenin mauzoleum) could not find an answer to this miracle... maybe he is only in coma? That was my first question... but probably that's also not the answer. Every day a monk is praying next to his body and keeping his senses open to make sure he would catch a message if the lama decides to communicate to today's world... interesting. By the way Putin visited the body last year, arriving with a helicopter and asking for good luck...

That's it for now, next blog will be probably from UB (Ulaanbaatar) after our Ger-to-Ger experience. I will try to add some pictures in a second.

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Comments

[anonymous]

Poor Chris, he could not dive because of his size ... funny story to read, but I can imagine the frustration ...