Skating on Lake Baikal

The train from Mongolia to Irkutsk the main city of Siberia was a 36 hour adventure. I'm sure that it can be done in a day, but i chose to save money by taking the daily train from Ulaan Baatar to Irkutsk, rather than getting off at the Irkutsk stop from the bi-weekly train that goes all the way to Moscow.

The daily train actually consisted of one carriage that started attached to the back of a local Mongolian train. The local train terminated at the border sometime in the middle of the night, and left our singular carriage sitting alone at the end of the platform. I had difficulty sleeping due to the drafty window that I swear was lightly sprinkling me with snow. After a bit of tossing and turning, wearing my hat to bed seemed like the acceptable solution.



I shared a compartment with a Russian student named Sema and Mogolian woman named Buja with her 8 year old son Tsengel. Tsengel didn't sit still the whole trip and swung around the bunk beds like a monkey most of the time. Buja and I had a conversation using a lot of gestures broken English and even some Korean thrown in there. I think Her sister married an American and was living in the US, but I could have misunderstood her. Sema, on the ther hand, was noticeably sad. He had left a whole group of friends at the Station at Ulaan Baatar who ran with the train to the end of the platform as we pulled away from the station. One guy actually jumped off the end of the platform and ran beside the tracks for a bit. It seems Sema wouldn't be seeing these guys for a long time.



The next Morning, I was awoken by a knock at the door. For all I knew, it was Mongolian customs getting an early start. I opened the door, filling the cabin with light and thus waking up Buja only to find an old lady trying to exchange Mongolian money for Russian. Oops.

Sometime mid-morning, the customs agents did actually come to see us. I got yelled at for not having a customs declaration from my entry into the country. The agent at the Chinese border had told us to wait, but never came back with the forms. Fortunately, the agent here just looked a little annoyed and went away.No fine, phew!

A train engine pulled us 10 or so kilometers with about 10 or 20 Mongolian soldiers on board. The Mongolian soldiers hopped off just before we got to the Russian side. Our carriage was put "under border control" for an hour or two during which our passports were taken and the carriage was searched top to bottom by women in green jumpsuits. We got out passports back and were free to leave the train. Things didn't start moving again until 3 or 4 in the afternoon when we were attached to a local Russian train and made our way toward Irkutsk stopping at every town village hamlet and platform in the middle of nowhere along the way. The scenery was much more lush that what I had seen in Mongolia. Grass existed in more than few tufts and there were lakes indicating a more wet climate than what I had seen.




To make a long story short, I arrived in Irkutsk the next morning and was shuttled off to Lake Baikal after getting picked up at the station by the tour operator I booked through. We picked up two German tourists along the way and then dropped off our passports at a hotel to get our visas registered. I learned on the way that the place we picked up the German tourists was where I was going to be staying the next night. It was there that I was supposed to pick up my passport and train tickets. I wasn't comfortable leaving my passport (no worries, I got it last night), but I didn't argue.

We drove an hour on the nicest stretch of highway in Siberia. Called the Eisenhower road locally, The Soviets built it in the late 50s for an expected visit of the American resident. While arrangements were being made, however, the Russians shot down an American spy plane which Washington never admitted to sending over Russian and for which they never apologised. I'm not an expert in Cold War history, but I would hazard a guess that this is when it started.

I was happy to be driving on such a nice road that cut through the forest and past a few small villages. The woods were a mix of evergreen and birch, and with a blanket of snow on the forest floor, was nice to look at.

We knew the hour drive was over when the scenery opened up to a huge frozen lake. Lake Baikal is a natural wonder that has to be seen to be believed. It is 45 km wide at its narrowest nut long and shaped like a kidney bean. The lake is bordered by mountains and sits in some kind of geological crevice (fault line?) that been filled with fresh water for 15 million years. I was reading that ALL other lakes in the world are 15,000 to 20,000 years old at most. High School science and geology teachers always like to boast that Canada has 9% of the world's fresh water. Well, Lake Baikal contains 20% of the worlds fresh water all by itself. That's over double the fresh water of Canada in one lake!

The town that I stayed in was quaint but very used to tourists. I arrived on Sunday morning and you could clearly see that Siberians far and wide had made the Sunday drive to the lake and were buying up the smoked fish and knickknacks like there was a shortage. Once settled in my home stay, I set out on a 6 hour epic journey. I first walked straight out in the middle of the lake for about 20 or 30 minutes. I had asked about safety before doing this and it seems that the ice is 60 cm at its thinnest and 2 m at its thickest.

The mountainous edge of the lake was a faint blue and white colour across the horizon. The ice was dark black where it wasn't covered by a thin lake of hard snow. you could see that the some of the cracks extended 60 cm down to the bottom of the ice, while others only partway down reveling cracked sheets of ice laying one layer across the top of another the appeared like natural crystal when looked at from different angles. I look a million pictures of everything I saw.






My adventure led me 5 km down the shore to the far end of the Village. There were plenty of wooden cottages painted different colours along the way. I was amused by the great number of touristy activities set up for the Russian tourists. There were sleds; There was a motorized hang glider; There were snowmobiles; and there was even a hovercraft. I preferred waking to all of these and didn't let my amusement in them spoil the natural wonder in front of me.

On my way to the far end of the lake, I stopped by a recommended restaurant and had an endemic fish called Omul prepared "the old Russian way" as the menu claimed. The old Russian way turned out to taste really good. the fish layer at the bottom of a tinfoil bowl topped with a mixture or potato mushrooms and cheese. Yum.

At the end of the village I popped into the local museum which highlighted the diversity of species (especially endemic ones) of the Baikal area. There was no English signage, but the diagrams, stuffed animals and fish and pickles specimens spoke for themselves. There were even seal fetuses in bottles of formaldehyde.

The highlight of my adventure was skating on the lake. I rented hockey skates from the tree start hotel near the museum. The looked at me like I was crazy when I said I wanted to go on the lake, but they let me do it. As I mentioned earlier, there were patches of snow on the ice. I should have said it the other way around there were patches of clear ice among the snow. This pattern mean that skiting in a straight line was almost impossible. I found some nice Australian tourists to take my picture. They had clearly never walked on ice before, and were closer to the edge of the ice where the river starts than I would have like (I'm still alive, so no harm done.)

I liked the photo they took, but wanted some action shots of me skating on the biggest piece of freshwater ice in the world. I found a few good spots and set my camera on my bag on the snow with a 10 second delay. I cut off body parts and missed the frame completely a few times but ended up with a few decent shots, with my whole body in the picture.



About a kilometer from shore, I crossed a fissure in the ice and found what I had been looking for, a large area of open Ice. it seems the fissure created a wind break that allowed for this open ice. I estimated the length of the area by measuring my stride and skating the length. 77 strides at 2.5 m per strides was 192.5 , long (hockey rinks are no more than 60 m long) with a width ranging from 5 to 25 m. You couldn't play pond hockey there, but it was fun to skate on.

I sprinted back to the shore, jumping from patch of clear ice to patch of clear ice. In some areas, I had to travel in an es shape to get where I wanted to go. I dropped my skis off, walked 5 km back to my homestay and fell asleep almost immediately.

The next day (yesterday), I slept in, ate breakfast and caught a minibus to a ski resort on the way back to Irkutsk. I rented cross country skis for two hours, and was directed to a slope of muddy snow covered in snowmobile tracks. It didn't look promising. I had never been that good at going downhill on cross country skis. I had brief lessons in grade seven and have been winging it ever since. I should have walked down this initial slope, but mistakenly decided to give it a try. My skis went out of control underneath me. Halfway down the slope they spread apart and I belly-flopped saving my chin only by arching my back and snapping my neck up. I was covered with muddy snow, and managed to fall once more before making it to the bottom alive. The belly flop, although getting me really dirty had a strange chiropractic effect that seems to have gotten rid of a chronic pain I've had in my lower neck for a long time.

Wow, it look like it's time for summary.... I caught a but back to Irkutsk went through a huge ordeal trying to find my homestay that included three friendly hotel staff who led me around the neighbourhood where I thought it was knocking on doors and asking. I
has to call Moscow and after 5 hours of searching and waiting, someone picked me up and brought me to my homestay where my tickets and passport were waiting.

This morning, I ate breakfast served by my homestay landlady, Galina. She speaks German and Russian. Little help to me, but we made do. There were some meat pastries with tea and hard boiled eggs. I tried to ask if I should put some kind of sauce in the pastry, but couldn't get a clear answer from Galina. She simply directed me to the fact that there was meat inside, which thinking about it now may have indicated that I shouldn't add sauce. I wast thinking along the lines of samosas and chutney in Indian cuisine. I guess I'll never know.

Anyhow, I've got a few more hours in Irkutsk, the pearl of Siberia (which looks quite dirty to me) before I board a three day train to Moscow. After all the running around, I'm looking forward to a little rest.