Lake Baikal - Listvianka

---

The train arrival to Irkutsk was scheduled quite early so we had to get out of bed before 7am, eat quickly and pack all our stuff. Less than an hour later we were walking out of the Irkutsk station and were litteraly assaulted by locals offering 'taxis'. We picked one of them randomly to take us to the bus station and we ended up in a terribly shapped van with a guy who didn't understand a word of English or German. The whole communication is down to our best friend: phrasebook. 😊

At the bust station we had really hard time understanding which bus we needed to take. With lots of struggle we did buy some bus tickets to Listvianka only to find out later that that particular bus leaves in three hours while there were some mini-busses that were leaving every half an hour or so. We asked, but they refused to take us on board... No clue why. :-S

Finally, when the bus arrived we weren't sure if we should have laughed or cried. Let's just say that the bus wasn't the latest model and the ride was really an interesting experience. Especially in the steep parts of the road we had an impulse of getting out of the bus and give it a little push... I guess language barrier is the only thing that kept us from doing so. 😊

In Listvianka we arranged for a home stay. Our host was an older lady, really nice and friendly. We dropped our bags, took a shower (felt so good after two days in train) and decided to walk to the city center that, we were told is less than 3 km further down the road and doable in half an hour. Well - let's say that even with hard pace it took us over an hour. The distance is more likely to be 5-6km. By the time we gave a quick peek to the little village the dark came down - so we decided to pay some local guy to drive us back to homestay. Walking in the forest, unlit road - didn't sound like a great idea, beside the fact that we were tired.

---

Photos

Waiting for our bus
Note the condition and load of the standard bus in the background

Our 'taxi'
... the guy vas driving while I was still trying to find 'bus-station' in the phrasebook.

Homestay
Our host lady, Mrs Galina. She was really nice and went out of her way to make us comfortable