Blogs from Lake Baikal, Siberia, Russia, Europe - page 9

We spent few days on Olchon island. We took a bus there. It was raining all the time that day, and unfortunately in the bus too :) There one lady had an umbrella, one other was sitting in the raincoat .... First night we spent in one shelter, with other 3 Slovak guys we met. They are travelling from Kyrgyzstan (through Kazachstan) and they plan to go to Kamchatka. The island is very beautiful, I mean the landscape, cliffs, lake itself. Otherwise the tourism just starts to boom, since 2 years they have electricity. The few villages there still do not have any roads with solid surface. So you can imagine how it looked like after heavy rains. But people there have good "off road" cars - UAZ. Russian car. I doubt some other car would ... read more

Free time this morning, check-out was at 12 and we had to meet in the lobby at 2pm to get the bus to the train station. We wandered around town, went to the internet café to check the emails and got a few supplies for the train trip. One unusual thing about Irkutsk is that there are many old wooden houses in the city that apparently have no running water, there are wells with pump handles at various places on the sidewalk and the occupants collect their water from there. There can’t be too many though as we never saw anyone at the pumps we passed. We left the hotel at about 3 to catch our 4.30 train, it wasn’t very far but Sergay was worried about the traffic. As it turned out the traffic was ... read more

Once again there was thunder and lightning and rain overnight but by the morning the rain had stopped. Unfortunately it was still overcast and threatening rain but that was ok, after breakfast we jumped on the bus and took a short trip up the road to the local Ecological Museum. Sergay talked at length about the lake, it’s history, the fish life, the seals, the lake, the fish life, the history,….. he is very passionate about lake Baikal. During the war before the connection between Irkutsk and Ulan-Ude was completed on the Trans-Siberian railway they even pushed railway carriages across the lake, they tried to pull them with an engine but it was too heavy so they dismantled it and took it across in bits in the carriages and reassembled it on the other side. The ... read more

Hi All, I can't believe it's been 8 days since my last post. We've done so much in the last week - I'm dreading how long it's going to take to write this blog (it doesn't matter now as its only costs 50 cent an hour here compared to 10 Euro in Siberia, that's why it has taken 8 days to update). We boarded the train in Moscow and were excited/nervous about being couped up in a small cabin for nearly 4 days straight, we needn't have worried, as we quickly opened up an Irish Pub in our dainty cabin and for most of the 4 days it was home to 8 -- 12 drunks, much to the annoyance of our carriage attendant. Maeve did up a sign which we hung up, it announced we were ... read more

Oder da, wo der Angara in den Baikalsee mündet. Ein See, für den Worte nicht reichen. 2 Tage in Listvianka.... read more