We’re staying for a couple of nights in Nikola, a tiny town on the Angara River which drains Lake Baikal. It’s near the slightly less-tiny town of Listvyanka, the main tourist destination on Lake Baikal about 75 minutes from Irkutsk. When the hotel in Irkutsk threw us out, we went to catch a bus to Listvyanka. Instead, just because it was there, ready to go, and cheap we ended up on a minibus – for all of $5 each. When they opened the back to put our luggage in, who was there but Dave and Hannah, the Canadian couple from both the Beijing-Ulan Bator and Ulan Bator-Irkutsk legs of our train trip. The omens were good.

What have we learned about Siberia so far? The gardens are amazing; it seems as though every house in a village has its own beautiful garden with deep, dark soil either just planted or now ready to plant.

Gardens

The buildings are beautiful. Lots of wood, lots of color.

Nikola house

They’re not afraid of color here

It looks pleasant

The lake is amazing.  By volume, it’s the world’s largest freshwater lake – 20 percent of all unfrozen fresh water in the world is here, more than the five Great Lakes combined. We hiked the four miles into town and then back yesterday for some great views, and then had dinner last night at a hotel in Nikola with a million-dollar view of the lake. Gorgeous.

Lakes, rivers, and birch trees (and heated floors) – just like Minnesota

Leaving Nikola, entering Listvyanka (if your Cyrillic isn’t up to speed…)

Lake Baikal

Boat on the Angara

The Angara River and Lake Baikal during a l-o-n-g sunset

And the food. There is a local fish here that’s described as a distant relative to salmon. You eat it as caviar, raw, pickled, smoked, fried – you name it. All washed down with vodka, of course, and with the tastiest rye bread you’ve ever had.

Just the basics – brown bread, local fish, pickled vegetables and vodka

We’re staying in a little, rustic lodge.  It’s not fancy – we’re sharing a bathroom, for God’s sake! – but said bathroom does have a heated floor and a tile representation of the Roman Coliseum! The former seems somewhat more appropriate than the latter and of course makes me feel like we’re visiting Becky in Duluth.  Oh yeah, and the lodge has a cat.  Guess how long it took Mark to make friends.

Mark and his friend

We’re not entirely sure what’s up for the rest of the day. The young woman who acts as the manager here asked what time we’d like breakfast. Being morning people we suggested 7:00 AM. She countered with 9:00 AM and in our best negotiating style we said OK, so that’s what it will be. There’s supposed to be a 12-mile hike on the lake up to another little town that we’re going to try to do, if we can figure out how to catch a boat back at the end.

We can manage 12 miles, but 24 would be a challenge with a sprained wrist. Otherwise it would be no problem, of course.

Wow – we’re in Siberia. Kind of the end of the world. We boarded the train in Ulan Bator after a final breakfast and crossed the border around midnight. When I woke up and looked outside I noticed two things: 1) the terrain had changed completely from Mongolia; and 2) it looked a lot like northern Minnesota. Maybe we should have saved a pile of money and just visited home!

Irkutsk doors

Our first stop was Irkutsk, a place previously known as the territory from which you attack Kamchatka. Turns out it’s a city of 600,000 and effectively the capital of eastern Siberia with beautiful wooden buildings and doorways.  It’s also the place where we start to realize that not everything is going to go perfectly right on this adventure.

Luggage on the horses, not the truck

– I wrote about riding horses with our luggage to get out of the ger camp we stayed in for two days.  What I didn’t add was that at the end, when I was getting off the horse so I could take a picture of Mark getting in, my shoe got caught in the stirrup, I spooked the horse, he kicked and ran away, and I sprained my wrist when I fell.  Since Mark started the adventure with a tennis elbow-like injury, between the two of us now we have no good right arms.  You should see us trying to move those 45-pound suitcases…

– We checked into a nice hotel and while unpacking remembered that great storage place on the train where we’d put all our toiletries … and where our toiletries still were.  🙁

– Still, we really liked the hotel; the room was great with big overstuffed leather furniture, really nice for enjoying a lazy couple of day.  We’d only booked it for one night to give us a chance to figure out what we wanted to do.  What we wanted to do – we thought – was to stay another day.  When Mark went to the front desk, though, he was told “Sorry, the hotel is full tonight.”

OK, fine, we won’t stay. Instead we’ll get on a minibus to Listvyanka, a little town overlooking Lake Baikal.  That’s what we really wanted to do anyway.  We know how to roll with the punches.  I hope.

Lefty’s last breakfast in Mongolia