Lake Baikal

LAKE BAIKAL

Whilst waiting at the platform of Ulan Bataar's main station (only station?) I was glad to rendezvous with my friends from the previous Beijing leg of the journey.  Their company proved a sanity saver as save for a few precious hours of dusk twillight where I was able to soak in my last vestige of the glorious Mongolian countryside, we were soon travelling in darkness, bound for the Russian border.  This meant yet another tedious immigration procedure, and changing of carriage bogeys to suit the Russian rail gauge.  It transpired that the Mongol/Russian engineers are not quite so prompt as the Chinese in their endeavours...  To the tune of 13 hours.     

Border towns in this part of the world are hardly bustling cosmopolitan metropolii, but thankfully this particular desolate outpost had the bare essentials covered.  By that I mean they had a small convenience store which sold vodka and gigantic plastic bottles of Russian beer.  And so it came to pass that we had our first authentic Russian experience by getting totally hammered.  As they say, when in Russia...

My Aussie mate Myles, with our industrial size beers.  At 9 in the morning...

Still all in all, it was actually a great day and in the hazy beer and vodka induced fog it seemed to pass by quite quickly.

Early the next morning, we pulled into Irkutsk, the administrative, trading and cultural centre of Eastern Siberia.  Irkutsk sits on the Angara river, about 70km from where it flows out from the world's greatest freshwater lake, the fan-statistical Lake Baikal.  Wow, where to start for all you stats gurus out there.  This is one flippin' huge body of water.  For starters, it's the world's oldest lake, being formed as a giant rift valley some 30 million years ago, it's the world's deepest lake (max depth of over 1 mile), and it is by far the most voluminous lake, containing a whopping 20% of the world's unfrozen fresh water.  Basically, if you stop in Irkutsk, you want to go and experience this natural wonder.

A little aside:  This gets my vote for worst job in the world - Public toilet toll booth worker, they're all over Russia.  I often sympathised and wondered what paths these people took to find themselves in the position where they were left with no option but to take up such a shitty job (pun slightly intended).  And could you imagine the job induction?

"OK Boris, basically what I'll need you to do is sit here all day between these two heinously foul shitters and look after the finances.  I apologise it does get a little smelly, and occasionally quite loud.  If it get's a little slow feel free to perhaps pop your head in to monitor the paper situation, or even give them a little scrub, but certainly don't consider an essential part of your duties..."  (I can assure you they didn't...)

This is most easily done by getting to the quaint little town of Listvyanka, which sits on the bank of the lake at the outflow of the Angara.  It gives the impression of being a lovely little seaside town, particularly in the summer when it thrives on the lake tourists, and is full of cute BnBs and boutique hotels along the water front.  With all the well kept flower gardens in bloom it creates a gorgeous setting, but I imagine it would be quite different when winter temps of -20 and below strike.  Despite the balmy and warm conditions I enjoyed during my time there, the water remains incredibly frigid year  round, about 4 degrees even in the height of summer.  This is bloody cold, and I can personally attest to this fact.

Myles and I post "refreshing dip" in the lake.  I cannot feel my limbs at this point, hence the snake-like motion up the rocks.

Listvyanka, despite it's scenic pleasures, provides little in the way of things to do, and apart taking an obligatory cruise, you don't have much on offer to really experience the lake.  I decided to go scuba diving in the lake, which boasts some of the clearest water in the world.  Of course, at 4 degrees, you need some serious gear, and it's strictly dry-suit scuba diving in those conditions.  For those unaware, dry-suit diving requires you wear a thick thermal layer of fleece (or similar) over your normal clothes, and over the top of this you wear a fully sealed rubber suit which keeps you warm and dry by trapping an insulating layer of air between you and the water. The extra nuances and intricacies of learning to operate in these suits under such conditions is usually learnt via an intensive 3 day course, run by a professional international organization.  I of course don't have any such training, but hey this is Russia...

Getting seriously geared up...

After convincing the operator that my board-short diving experience in various tropical paradises would be sufficient, I was met by  our dive guides, two giant heavies with little to no English who looked like they'd just finished a job for the Russian Mafia, Sergei and Mikhail (classic!).  I was joined by a fellow intrepid and similarly grossly under-qualified traveller Benn, who also not surprisingly did not speak Russian...

Benn and I getting ready for our first dry-suit dive.  We were still optimistic at this stage...

So here we were getting ready for our first dry-suit experience, and getting the summary of a 3 day course given to us in about 5 minutes in thick Runglish.  We had about as much success communicating above water as below, but through basic imitation we managed to get ourselves suited up with the 20  kg of gear and waddled over to the frigid water's edge.  Now you have pretty much every part of your body covered by rubber, air, fleece, clothes except for parts of your face.  Even with that tiny bit of exposure, my breath was taken away at the shock of how cold that lake really is.  Instant ice-cream headache.

I followed Sergei into the depths, my suit sucking against my body like cling-wrap as the pressure increased.  It is at this time when knowledge of how to operate dry-suits comes in handy, and coincidentally it is when it became apparent I had none.  Your dry suit is attached to your tank so you can pump more air into your suit so as to let your body's heat warm the blanket of air this creates.  I was frickin' freezing (despite the suit) so I was pumping air like there was no tomorrow; only thing is once it's in there, it takes a bit of a knack to get it out, a knack I most certainly didn't have.  So one minute I'm floating around 25m down with Sergei, the next I notice my legs have ballooned with air, and I'm trapped suspended upside down, unable to get my legs back under me.  Then as I was squirming around trying to release the air, I didn't notice my slow ascent which, as my suit expanded under the decreasing pressure, turned into a full blown bolt to the surface.  I was like a beach ball released from the depths,  totally out of control (and Sergei's who was frantically trying to pull me down).  Most would know that going from 25m to the surface in a matter of seconds is not good for one's health, and I was fortunate to not experience any side effects.  Sergei was typically forthright in his assessment when he met me at the surface.  "Dry-Suit.  You.  No good."                                           

Sergei was not pleased.

We did venture back down and it was a great experience overall, but despite the famed biodiversity of the lake (there are over 2600 species living in the lake, over three quarters of which are found nowhere else in the world), I pretty much saw a few shrimp, a distinctly non-endemic looking fish, and a cannon.  I did get to sample some of the aquatic life at the ubiquitous street markets and restaurants in Lystvianka however where you can find the lake's produce prepared in every manner you can imagine.  Their smoked omul is absolutely to die for, as is the baikal sturgeon's caviar.

Benn, his girlfriend and I share debrief coffee with the bruise brothers, Mikhail and Sergei.

I got a lift back to Irkutsk with the bruise brothers following the dive, but similar to my Mongolian experience, I was dropped off with absolutely no idea as to my bearings.  True enough, I was in bustling city CBD and not on the desolate Mongolian steppe, but resolving my predicament proved just as difficult, primarily due to the cyrillic alphabet used in Russian.  Despite having a map, I've rarely been more incapable of getting orientated; it's like solving some enigma code every time you just want to compare the english street name on your map with the cyrillic street signs.  On top of this, English is an exceedingly rare commodity in this part of the world.

Lenin...  He had such high hopes.

After a while you start to get a feel for which letters are switched for which by comparing to "control" signs, for example "Л Е Н И Н" is LENIN, which you know because it's written under the huge statue of the man with the klingon forehead who is still somewhat revered or at least commemorated in this country.  You don't see too many statues of Stalin however...

The famous wooden houses Irkutsk.  The town has burnt down a few times as you can imagine.

Irkutsk is quite a cosmopolitan little city of about a half million or so and it serves as the cultural and learning epicentre of the region, it's university being one of the most prestigious in Russia.  This preeminence is largely due to it's history of housing one of the first waves Russian intelligentsia exiled to Siberia.  Many prominent scholars, artists and nobles that were exiled in the 18th century congregated here to such an extent that 1 in 3 Urkutsk men were political refugees.  Basically it was one of the first gulags, albeit much more comfortable than what was to come under Stalin in particular.

I loved this shop in downtown Irkutsk.  Thought you have to drive all around town to get your music AND munition supplies?  We've got you covered!  Free guitar case with every machine gun purchased.  Warning: Do NOT play Stairway to Heaven... serious consequences.

From my experience, those early exiles must have brought some pretty fine women along with them, because I had my first exposure to just how many spectacularly beautiful Russian women there are.  I swear half the women under 30 would not look out of place on the cover of Vogue (or Sports Illustrated for that matter).  They're very fashion conscious and although an obvious generalization, most young women appear to be immensely concerned with their physical appearance.  Another generalization, but one that is remarkably accurate (speak to ANYONE who's been to Russia and they'll concur) is that once these beautiful goddesses turn 30 and find a husband, it's like midnight at Cinderella's ball and boom, they all turn into something resembling those babooshka dolls.

No pictures of beautiful Russian women.  Just old pieces of Russian military hardware which seem to be scattered all over the place.  Here is the T-34, the best tank of WW2, and chief destroyer of the German Panzers...  I found it interesting at least...

A word of advice; in what I thought might have been a manna from heaven, I actually was asked out to dinner by probably one of the top 3 most beautiful women who I've ever had eye contact with.  As you can imagine, I was pretty excited and things were going well when she met me that evening, looking like she'd just finished a fashion shoot, kissed me and grabbed my hand...  I was somewhat delirious by this stage, and things only got more ethereal when we stopped to pick up her cousin, also spectacularly gorgeous.  So here I am rattling off tales of kangaroos, snakes and sharks, sitting opposite two completely enthralled stunning 19 year olds, hanging off my every word...

...Until I mentioned that I was leaving the next day.  Like a deflated balloon hurriedly zipping it's way to the floor, both girls lost interest, hurriedly finished their sushi (Irkutsk has some amazing Lake Baikal sushi incidentally...) and called their Dad's to come and pick them up...  Mine was an elementary mistake in Russia it seems...

More military relics!  This time the flatbed rocket launchers known as Stalin's organs due to their terrifying scream as they were launched.  Woot!  Who needs hot Russian women anyway...

It's still a very patriarchal society and it's widely known Russian women want to get married; if you ain't sticking around, then neither are they.  This makes sense as there has to be some reason as to how the boorish Russian men are able to keep procreating with such divine beauty...  Seriously the vodka-swilling, adidas-wearing, oafish and uncouth Russian male population, 90% of whom I swear still live in caves, have seriously lucked out in that department.

I don't mean to sound mean-spirited or harsh with that assessment, although it is a commonly held opinion.  I try to give every person I meet the benefit of the doubt, but I pretty much become convinced of this conclusion when experiencing the next leg of the journey, a sanity challenging 4 day continuous journey to Moscow.  And so I boarded the train on a Wednesday afternoon, not to disembark until a distant Sunday morning.  I'd alway wanted an authentic Russian experience...