We won't bore you with more details of another rocky night on the rails, but will just vent our spleens at our jobs worth provodnista who shook us awake at 5.30 (2 hours before reaching our destination) and then locked the toilet doors an hour before arrival, leaving a lot of angry and cross legged passengers! This apart, the journey was relatively un-eventful, though more scenic than the previous days, particularly the first few hours after Krasnoyarsk, as we wound our way through wooded hills, crossing lakes and rivers. We also met our first English speaking fellow passengers - a young French Canadian couple, who like us are heading down to Australia, albeit by a slightly different route.
At Irkutsk, we again stepped bleary eyed off the train and very quickly found our new guide, Lena. Just as quickly she incurred Sue's wrath, for her abrupt manner and lack of empathy, but within 5 minutes, we were onto a minibus and heading out of town for the 70 kilometre drive to Listvyanka, a pin-prick village on the south-western shore of Lake Baikal (for those interested, find Irkutsk on the atlas and follow the Angara river down into the lake - and that's where we've been!). The sun was only just rising, but straight away Irkutsk had a very different feel to any of the other Russian cities that we have been to: probably more European, but certainly more spacious and built in harmony with the broad curves and inlets of the river, which make it feel like a harbour city.
We struggled to stay awake as our bus headed out of the city, following the steep river valley sides, but a bumpy road that jolted us awake if our heads did nod put paid to any ideas of sleep. And it was just as well, because on a clear sunny morning there were some glorious views of the river as it wound its way towards Lake Baikal. These views seemed to get progressively better, until we rounded a bend and the river merged with the vast blue expanse of the lake and on the far side we could make out the snow-capped peaks of the Khamar Dhaban mountain range.
We have to bore you at this point with a couple of nerdy facts about Lake Baikal. Did you know that it is easily the largest lake in the world, containing one fifth of the world's fresh unfrozen water and more than the five Great Lakes of North America combined? Squeezed into the right shape, England would probably snugly fit inside it - not bad for a lake that we hadn't heard of a year ago!
But back to the moment. We arrived at our very pleasant looking guest house and for a moment were lulled into expecting a warm welcome: instead our landlady glared at us and barked 'take your shoes off!' before we were even across the portal. An hour later, we had forgiven her this lack of soft skills, as she served us up a hearty breakfast of cold meats, cheese, freshly baked bread and home-made blackcurrant jam.
This seems to be a recurrent theme in Russia, that people initially greet strangers very coldly and suspiciously (even with hostility) and combined with the lack of a recent tradition of customer service, has often left us with a bad impression of people. But with those few people that we have get to know, a much more warm hearted personality and jovial sense of humour has emerged. This has particularly been the case in Siberia and the people here seem to have a strong sense of a Siberian identity which is separate from being Russian. Back in Krasnoyarsk, we spoke with Anatoliy about national stereotypes and he felt that the Siberian stereotype was of 'the open-heart', meaning that they would, sometimes rather naively, do anything for people and could get taken advantage of as a result. We hadn't wanted to upset him by saying that this was a stereotype that hadn't occurred to us, but it was interesting nonetheless.
Our home for a couple of days on Lake Baikal, had a strong 'end of the line' feel about it, literally as well as metaphorically, as the road did actually run out here. This impression was exaggerated by the village largely being here for (mostly Russian) tourists - and the season was pretty much over. What was left was a small fleet of fishing and supply vessels on the jetty and lots of maintenance and building work hurriedly being carried out before the snows arrive. But, we were blessed with beautiful weather (apparently it is unusual to be able to see the mountains on the other side as clearly as we were able to, if at all) and we walked for miles along the lake and up onto the cliff paths at the end of the village, only stopping when the path became too perilous. The clear skies amplified the bright blue of the lake waters and the golden colours of the trees that covered the hillsides rising out of the lake.
On Thursday, we had the bonus of the small weekly fish market and the village air was permeated with the smell of omul and sig fish being smoked in makeshift metal boxes. It seemed like all of the locals were in on this act: with rows of women selling identical thin dried fish: but the result did not look tempting to these eyes. As we had some lovely fresh fish in a restaurant the night before, we went for a paella cooked in an industrial size wok and sat and ate it with lots of the locals on the small pebbly beach, washed down with a local beer. We were approached by a burly man in military uniform and held our breath tentatively, until his face broke into a big grin and he proudly announced that he was from Azerbaijan and that our food was cooked by his very good friend Mr Bob Spongepants! After a few more theatrical gestures and words that we didn't understand, he then left us to our food and puzzling over whether that was an Azerbaijani uniform and indeed whether Azerbaijani police had any jurisdiction in Russia.
On Friday morning we visited the Lake Baikal museum, which turned out to be rather dry (particularly as the information was nearly all in Russian) other than for a virtual submarine that sunk 1,600 metres to the bottom of the lake, with videos of the playing out on the portholes. Amazingly the submarine was yellow, but we somehow resisted the temptation to start singing 'We all live in a ...' - the stone-faced operative didn't look like she would appreciate our sense of humour and we didn't want to get slung out 1,600 metres below the surface! Outside they had created a 'dendarium', planted with several 100 species of local flora and this seemed to have attracted all sorts of birds to the area and also some red and black squirrels (none of your common greys here!).
After our peaceful couple of days by the lake, we are now back in Irkutsk for a day and a night. It's a cool, sunny Saturday and we are sat by the side of the river as I write this. We have been entertained by a series of wedding parties traipsing past with their retinues and some fishermen out in little boats on the river. Behind us, is the grand Cathedral with gilded domes, some of the original wooden houses that survived a catastrophic fire in the 19th century and a war memorial where we have seen the local cadets marching past and laying wreaths this morning. We've almost done our sight-seeing here in Irkutsk and will shortly be on the hunt for somewhere to get a last hearty goulash or stroganoff before heading for our evening train.
Russia has made for interesting, if sometimes mentally and physically tough, travelling. If we remain apprehensive about the 36 train journey ahead, we are equally excited about the prospect of Mongolia and getting out into the Gobi Desert and the Steppe. More on that to come, but in the meantime, here are some photos from the last few days.
Finally, we have heard that a number of you have had difficulties placing comments on our blog. I'm afraid that we don't have a solution for this right now. Perhaps anyone who has successfully placed comments (Sharon, Paul, Holly, Lisa?) can let us know how they did it! In the meantime, we have been reading our e-mails regularly up to now.
We don't know how much internet connectivity there will be on the Mongolian Steppe, so we may now be off-line for a little while.
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