Squatting in the not-quite-long enough grass between the ancient, rusted railway line and the cliffs over the world's deepest lake, praying that the ominous rumbling I could hear was only my diseased stomach and not the approach of the daily train carrying hordes of camera-wielding tourists hanging from the windows, pestered by the continuous Siberian drizzle, I looked out over the lake, unchanged in millions of years, and thought: what am I doing here?
I suppose I was always heading to this point, but it didn't feel any more normal when it arrived. We got off the train in Irkutsk: "the Paris of Siberia", they used to call it - presumably referring to the state of the toilets - and felt we both needed some nature. Lake Baikal was one of the key milestones of our journey, something we've both longed to see, and after the millions in the cities and the miles in the trains, it was beginning to take on the status of a promised land.
Siberian cities are odd. Russian men, for instance, retain a taste for fashions that might be considered more than a little bit camp in the West - camouflage fatigues, sailors hats - and combined with the huge number of construction workers, ubiquitous police officers, traditionally dressed Buryat people, and an almost universal fondness for big moustaches, it makes the whole place look like a giant Village People tribute act. I've never been comfortable with gay disco, so off we went for the near-solitude of a hike around the Circumbaikal Railway. It was originally built as a branch off the main Trans-Siberian line at the start of the 20th Century, but nowadays is used mainly to transport tourists who have the sense not to want to see the lake on foot. Not us, though: we'll walk it.
We started off in Khultuk: I don't know if it would be fair to call it a one-horse town, because the only horses I saw were in tins in the local grocery shop. If you put all the tins' contents together they might tot up to a single horse, I suppose, although probably lacking any of the nice bits: a horse with 18 hooves, 25 testicles, 13 eyeballs, two arseholes, enough hair for seven tails, no rump or flank, and more shins than legs. I think I bet on such a creature to win last year's Cheltenham Gold Cup, but that doesn't mean I want to eat it. The local smoked fish was a treat, though, as was the beer. It was to be the last for a while.
87km, five days, a fair bit of rain, a lot of diarrhoea, about a millions steps on railway sleepers, and dozens of long, dank, dark tunnels later, we were in Listvyanka, "the Russian Riviera". The problem was the scenery hadn't much changed along the way: although the distance we'd covered is discernable on a picture of Baikal taken from space, it's actually a pretty tiny part of the lake's whole expanse, so we'd not seen a fraction of the wonderful diversity of nature that surrounds this geological phenomenon blah blah blah... I just wanted a beer and a proper toilet, actually, but Mari likes that sort of wilderness stuff, so next it was off to Olkhon Island for more hiking, camping, marching, general deprivation and inconvenience. She's going to kill me when she reads this, by the way, so I hope somebody's enjoying reading it. I'm quite enjoying writing it, as it happens. Hello Mari, love you!
Anyway - Olkhon Island. A bum-numbing six-hour minibus trip and ferry crossing from Irkutsk. For the first part of it our driver, who looked unnervingly like Peter Schmeichel, was driving like the bloke out of Vanishing Point, but about three hours into it the tarmac ran out and the journey became more akin to travelling on a BMX bike - except the progress was slower. To be fair we were probably covering quite a lot of distance if you include the sickening sideways lurches, leaps into the air, twists to avoid potholes and so on, but the actual forward motion was minimal. Impossible to read a book, with all that juddering and shaking, so there was more time to enjoy staring at the interminable Siberian countryside.
For the hideously uncompromising "modern economic and military powerhouse" image presented by Russia's western face in Moscow, it's incredible how the vast majority of the land is still a place of abject backwardness and poverty. Out here, you can see how people quite literally scrape a living off the land: they sit by the site of the roadside with weak flowers and buckets of tiny berries, waiting all day on the hope that a driver will stop and buy some for coppers. We saw dozens of them, as well as one bloke just dancing - dancing, I say - who I presume must have become utterly demented by the sheer endlessness of it all. Really, I think when it comes to the point that you're dancing alone without music by the side of a near-deserted road in the Siberian wilderness, and you're not even dressed as one of the Village People, it would be kinder just to shoot him, but I'm not sure if they still do that sort of thing out here. Maybe not. I'd probably have been shot for first-degree cowardice in Altai if they did.
Anyway, we made it to Olkhon Island. From Khuzir, the island's dusty main settlement - which looks a bit like the Wild West with backpackers - our plan was to head to the North, where there are forests and hills. Instead, for reasons neither of us could really articulate, we headed to the South, where there is only shoreline and flatland. Camping in the mist on the deserted, rocky coast, after all our miles on trains, buses, boats, and foot, it felt like we'd reached the end of the world, or at least the end of Russia. In reality we'd done nothing of the sort; it stretches on for two thousand more miles like this, to Vladivostok on the Pacific coast. But we've seen enough of it, and next we'll take a sharp right to Mongolia and deeper into Asia. I sense that soon I will look back on my Lake Baikal toilet experiences with greater fondness than I have suggested here...
I suppose I was always heading to this point, but it didn't feel any more normal when it arrived. We got off the train in Irkutsk: "the Paris of Siberia", they used to call it - presumably referring to the state of the toilets - and felt we both needed some nature. Lake Baikal was one of the key milestones of our journey, something we've both longed to see, and after the millions in the cities and the miles in the trains, it was beginning to take on the status of a promised land.
Siberian cities are odd. Russian men, for instance, retain a taste for fashions that might be considered more than a little bit camp in the West - camouflage fatigues, sailors hats - and combined with the huge number of construction workers, ubiquitous police officers, traditionally dressed Buryat people, and an almost universal fondness for big moustaches, it makes the whole place look like a giant Village People tribute act. I've never been comfortable with gay disco, so off we went for the near-solitude of a hike around the Circumbaikal Railway. It was originally built as a branch off the main Trans-Siberian line at the start of the 20th Century, but nowadays is used mainly to transport tourists who have the sense not to want to see the lake on foot. Not us, though: we'll walk it.
We started off in Khultuk: I don't know if it would be fair to call it a one-horse town, because the only horses I saw were in tins in the local grocery shop. If you put all the tins' contents together they might tot up to a single horse, I suppose, although probably lacking any of the nice bits: a horse with 18 hooves, 25 testicles, 13 eyeballs, two arseholes, enough hair for seven tails, no rump or flank, and more shins than legs. I think I bet on such a creature to win last year's Cheltenham Gold Cup, but that doesn't mean I want to eat it. The local smoked fish was a treat, though, as was the beer. It was to be the last for a while.
87km, five days, a fair bit of rain, a lot of diarrhoea, about a millions steps on railway sleepers, and dozens of long, dank, dark tunnels later, we were in Listvyanka, "the Russian Riviera". The problem was the scenery hadn't much changed along the way: although the distance we'd covered is discernable on a picture of Baikal taken from space, it's actually a pretty tiny part of the lake's whole expanse, so we'd not seen a fraction of the wonderful diversity of nature that surrounds this geological phenomenon blah blah blah... I just wanted a beer and a proper toilet, actually, but Mari likes that sort of wilderness stuff, so next it was off to Olkhon Island for more hiking, camping, marching, general deprivation and inconvenience. She's going to kill me when she reads this, by the way, so I hope somebody's enjoying reading it. I'm quite enjoying writing it, as it happens. Hello Mari, love you!
Anyway - Olkhon Island. A bum-numbing six-hour minibus trip and ferry crossing from Irkutsk. For the first part of it our driver, who looked unnervingly like Peter Schmeichel, was driving like the bloke out of Vanishing Point, but about three hours into it the tarmac ran out and the journey became more akin to travelling on a BMX bike - except the progress was slower. To be fair we were probably covering quite a lot of distance if you include the sickening sideways lurches, leaps into the air, twists to avoid potholes and so on, but the actual forward motion was minimal. Impossible to read a book, with all that juddering and shaking, so there was more time to enjoy staring at the interminable Siberian countryside.
For the hideously uncompromising "modern economic and military powerhouse" image presented by Russia's western face in Moscow, it's incredible how the vast majority of the land is still a place of abject backwardness and poverty. Out here, you can see how people quite literally scrape a living off the land: they sit by the site of the roadside with weak flowers and buckets of tiny berries, waiting all day on the hope that a driver will stop and buy some for coppers. We saw dozens of them, as well as one bloke just dancing - dancing, I say - who I presume must have become utterly demented by the sheer endlessness of it all. Really, I think when it comes to the point that you're dancing alone without music by the side of a near-deserted road in the Siberian wilderness, and you're not even dressed as one of the Village People, it would be kinder just to shoot him, but I'm not sure if they still do that sort of thing out here. Maybe not. I'd probably have been shot for first-degree cowardice in Altai if they did.
Anyway, we made it to Olkhon Island. From Khuzir, the island's dusty main settlement - which looks a bit like the Wild West with backpackers - our plan was to head to the North, where there are forests and hills. Instead, for reasons neither of us could really articulate, we headed to the South, where there is only shoreline and flatland. Camping in the mist on the deserted, rocky coast, after all our miles on trains, buses, boats, and foot, it felt like we'd reached the end of the world, or at least the end of Russia. In reality we'd done nothing of the sort; it stretches on for two thousand more miles like this, to Vladivostok on the Pacific coast. But we've seen enough of it, and next we'll take a sharp right to Mongolia and deeper into Asia. I sense that soon I will look back on my Lake Baikal toilet experiences with greater fondness than I have suggested here...
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