It’s Sunday morning, and we are back in Irkutsk, where we have an unplanned, but welcome, down day. We intended to leave on a train for Krasnoyarsk this morning but couldn’t get seats on the trains we wanted. So we bought tickets for tomorrow morning, and we get to spend the whole day here. Not just any day, but our friend Laura Germain’s birthday. In Irkutsk!

This is actually quite a charming place. Earlier we posted some pictures of the many old wooden buildings; they are everywhere, sometimes in varying stages of disrepair. The city also has some monumental architecture as well, crossing the lines between Grand European, Russian Imperial, and Soviet Monstrosity. Our hotel is near a lovely square flanked by the whole variety.

With no travel or other big plans today we’ll take it easy. We’ll do some genuine sightseeing. And we’ll run some needed errands. We have a pile of Mongolian money that we need to exchange for Russian roubles. And we still need to replace a few items from the toiletries we lost on the train. Yesterday, in fact, my need to replace my finger nail clippers reached a boiling point, and that became my paramount mission for the day. Mission accomplished.

Given the trouble we had getting train seats for Krasnoyarsk yesterday, we’re going to try to buy seats for the rest of our Tran Siberian journey, all the way to Moscow. Yesterday we mapped out what we want to do, including stops in Krasnoyarsk (a bustling Siberian city set in the mountains), Novosibirsk (the Siberian capital and Russia’s third largest city, Tomsk (a very old Siberian settlement that it now a vibrant college town and arts community), Yekaterinburg (where the last tsar and his family were massacred), and Nizhny Novgorod (an ancient Russian capital with a dramatic ‘kremlin’ set above the town).

Here are some photos of the grand architecture from Kirov Square. And happy birthday, Laura!

Momnumental architecture around Kirov Square

The headquarters of “VostSibUgol” — the Eastern Siberia Coal company

The imposing facade of a Soviet era regional administration building

The Angara hotel, Soviet architecture at its dreary best

“State Bank of the U.S.S.R.” You don’t see that every day.

We tried and failed to make it to Bolshie Koty, the 12-mile hike along Lake Baikal. But it was still, as Mark put it at one point, “insanely beautiful.”

Listvyanka is ready for beach season

We’d read about this hike to Bolshie Koty in our Lonely Planet where there was a lot of excitement about the Great Baikal Trail – a hiking trail they’re building that will eventually circle the lake – so I just kind of assumed a marked trail, or at least some place that indicated where you started. Nada. We took a bus into Listvyanka – which on a beautiful Friday in late spring was quite the lively place – and we’d ask someone about the path. They’d kind of just point up the lake. “That way.”

OK, so we started. Nothing seemed right, though. As beautiful as it was, it just didn’t seem possible that the trail would be this intersecting warren of little paths, some going along the lake, some going up the steep hill. So we tried one route for a while, then tried it further up the hill.  At times it was distinctly dangerous; one small slip and you could fall a long way.

Mark, maybe on the trail

Lake Baikal or the Mediterranean?

After two hours, when we hadn’t seen any sign that we were even on the trail – if there was a trail – and hadn’t seen another soul – if there are souls… – we had this crazy idea: Maybe it wasn’t a good career move to get lost in Siberia.  Maybe we should turn back.

Lake Baikal

Lake Baikal

Giving up is something of a sacrilege. But at this point in life maybe I’ve learned that giving up might be smarter than, well, getting lost in Siberia.  We’d tried every possible path, and couldn’t see that anything made sense. After two hours, there was no reason to believe we were any closer to our goal than when we’d started.

A trail, but the trail?

So we turned around. Mark went back to the hotel to do some travel planning (it’s a lot of work figuring out where to stop and where to stay and how long to spend…) and I did some exploring. I tried every possible variation from our starting point in Listvyanka to see if we’d made the wrong turn. We hadn’t. If there was a trail, we had been on it.

Famous Dave

Fast forward to dinner.  Dave and Hannah of Canada, train, and beer fame were joining us in Nikola for dinner and vodka.  They brought a new Russian friend, Anton, and Andy & Jackie (Brits who’d also been on the Beijing-UB train) were staying there, too, so mayhem seemed likely. Before all that got started, though, Dave tells us that they’d done the full 12-mile hike.  They ended up following a local guy who was hiking there – it was his town – and so they knew they were on the right path. Damn them! Chances are we’d been on the right path, too, but with no signs and no evidence we decided not to risk it.

Dinner was all you would expect it to be in Russia with seven people, two-and-a-half liters of vodka, and a guy turning disco lights on and playing drums. I paced myself well and did not fall for the Russian’s insistence that when someone toasts you must – must! – empty your vodka glass. It just seems as though contracting out control over liquor volume isn’t smart. And if I were going to do that, I sure as hell wouldn’t contract it out to a Russian! As it happened I was sober enough to veto the exciting but ultimately loony idea of going down to the lake for freezing-cold midnight swim. Nothing good was going to come of that except a great story. I’m fine this morning.  Mark’s OK, too, but Dave and the gang are hurting.

Happy, warm cat

Favorite moment before breakfast. It’s 8:15 AM and the cat is howling. Howling. She’d spent yesterday sleeping on the heated bathroom floor, lying on a towel. I check in the bathroom and there she is, but there is no towel on the floor. So I put a towel down, she climbs on and immediately quits howling.

Favorite lines at breakfast. Anton, the Russian guy, to the hotel manager, “I usually don’t drink.” Mark translates for us, but no one believes Anton. That was not the vodka-pounding of an amateur. Dave, the Canadian who occasionally rocks a skirt. “Why did I take my underwear off last night?”

Enough said.

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.