continued from part 1: click here.
yekaterinburg to novosibirsk was supposed to take 30 hours, but it ended up taking closer to 45. for a reason unknown to anyone on the train, we turned around at some point and took a very circuitous detour… through kazakhstan! so i’m not complaining; another country! they even gave us an assortment of complimentary carbs for the trouble: bread, instant mashed potatoes, ramen noodles, and biscuits. and the train was full of little kids which made it more exciting! there was a little girl in our bunk area named dacha. we knew because mom kept yelling at her “dacha!”; “dacha!” upon our almost sunrise-arrival in the smoggy, uninspiring city of novosibirsk we sweatily lugged our backpacks and ten liters of water >one hour to a soviet era (lacking the kitsch) “hotel,” thinking “wasn’t this supposed to be a holiday?” but then we woke up, went on some runs in a theme-park themed park with camels and got some subway sandwiches for breakfast and guzzled some amazing rye bread-based liquid called kvass and thought “there’s no where else i’d rather be right now than in siberia!” then we rushed to the train station …
the next train to irkutsk was another 30 hours. by this time we were getting used to being on trains! irkutsk is a fascinating city: the de facto capital of siberia. we learned about the white army and their eastern resistance against the bolsheviks during the russian civil war, led by kolchak. a statue of him was recently erected in irkutsk: they had to make the sides of it super steep so that modern day communists wouldn’t deface it. also, much of the city’s rich cultural history can originally be attributed to the decembrists, political exiles to siberia in the early 1800s. we found a nice monastery and stuck around for a service. everyone stands the whole service in a russian orthodox church… also, you come and go as you wish as the service is happening.
our second day we got up early to attempt to travel to lake baikal but trying to find a certain very-hard-to-find hydrofoil station ended up being an epic fail that involved many hours of hiking and eventually severe dehydration and hypoglycemia. the problems for me reached a vivid climax when, after purchasing a bottle of fermented sour goat milk that had become a personal rehydration favorite, the entire bottle exploded into my eyes and all over my body because i didn’t know that this particular product happened to be carbonated. yes, carbonated fermented goat milk – only in russia. the next day we did manage to find our way to lake baikal – on a minibus. the night before i happened to be bitten by one million bugs in my sleep; thankfully maria did not desert me despite my unsightliness. lake baikal is the deepest lake in the world!! we love superlatives! a few facts: 2600 species endemic to the lake. including a species of tapeworm that eats entire fish from the outside! the only freshwater seals in the world, the nerpas (they’re really cute). 20% of the world’s freshwater finds itself in lake baikal at any given moment in time! we hiked along the shore to a tourist-oriented and garbage-strewn town called listvyanka, where we ate some freshly smoked omul, a fish that lives in the lake. absolutely unbelievably tasty! we then climbed around with a super friendly russian preteen in some mostly destroyed communist era warehouses where we found some nice views of the lake! we climbed a mountain… to discover that there were so many trees up there that there was no view, but it was still fun! to get back to irkutsk we took the hydrofoil. those things are exhilarating! we chilled on the roof with the wind while a chubby, gold-necklaced guy who apparently avidly hunts wolves and used to be a kgb agent shared a bottle of fine moldovan wine with us. it was nice! 🙂
our final russian train ride took us around the bottom of lake baikal, where a two minute stop was enough time to frantically fight back the restraints of the provodnitza (carriage attendent) to buy some last smoked omul through the train door, and on to ulan ude, the capital of buryatia. made some friends on the train, including a pro boxer and a guy named sergei who shared exactly zero common language with me, but we still managed to have a two hour conversation! something i didn’t really know about russia before: there are 160 indigenous ethnicities or “nationalities” in the russian federation! indeed, that’s why they call it a federation, because many of its parts are relatively autonomous republics. the friendly owner of the hostel we stayed at was ardently “not russian!”, rather buryat. the buryat people are related to the mongols and are big into shamanism and ancestor worship and the like, which made ulan ude about the most exotic place we had been to yet on this trip. we learned that the most revered site in shamanism are some random rocks on an isolated island in lake baikal – people make pilgrimages there from all over the world. the biggest thing to know about ulan ude: it is home to the largest lenin head in the world! the buryats also make a mad tasty version of dumplings that they call booze. overall a pretty good time in the republic or buryatia!
the journey continues in mongolia: click here