RUSSIA - Irkutsk (Lake Baikal)
The scenery was spectacular in places and neverending in others on the journey across Siberia. A Russian guy called Sergei was also in our cabin and was very quiet for the first day and a bit. On the last day on the train when we saw proper snow and braved the outside at short stops we met a Norweigen guy. He joined us in our cabin for some serious vodka drinking and later Sergei returned form the restaurant car and joined us also. We pollished off a lot and somehow all started to understand each other, or so we thought! We shared out our food, bread cheese ham he shared his Red Fish. It was excellent.
We got picked up in Irkutsk by driver and guide and got whisked away to Lake Baikal. What a beautiful place. We stayed in a village called Listvinyenke (sp) in a traditional log house with a nice lady called Olga.
We experiance a tradition Russian Banya (sauna) which was their washing method as they had no running water. We had a quick tour of the village and later Karl and I went to the edge of the lake at night. It was very cold, so cold that having my hand out of my glove for 3 seconds made it hurt, about -20 we think, the clear dark sky with bright stars made it worth it. It was -14 some of the next day, perfect for snow mobiling apart from there was no snow. Quad biking was arranged instead. It was brilliant fun travelling down the valley over frozen streams, snow, mud, dirt, fields i got the bike clem and i were sharing stuck in the stream at one point when the 3 inch ice broke.
The following day we walked up to the local ski lift and went to the look out point, spectacular, we then got chased down the hill by a group of small birds.They persued us for about 30 minutes. 
We returned to Irkutsk the next day and looked around for a few hours before getting on the next train, the train to Ulaanbaatar the capital of Mongolia.
The scenery was spectacular in places and neverending in others on the journey across Siberia. A Russian guy called Sergei was also in our cabin and was very quiet for the first day and a bit. On the last day on the train when we saw proper snow and braved the outside at short stops we met a Norweigen guy. He joined us in our cabin for some serious vodka drinking and later Sergei returned form the restaurant car and joined us also. We pollished off a lot and somehow all started to understand each other, or so we thought! We shared out our food, bread cheese ham he shared his Red Fish. It was excellent.
We got picked up in Irkutsk by driver and guide and got whisked away to Lake Baikal. What a beautiful place. We stayed in a village called Listvinyenke (sp) in a traditional log house with a nice lady called Olga.
We experiance a tradition Russian Banya (sauna) which was their washing method as they had no running water. We had a quick tour of the village and later Karl and I went to the edge of the lake at night. It was very cold, so cold that having my hand out of my glove for 3 seconds made it hurt, about -20 we think, the clear dark sky with bright stars made it worth it. It was -14 some of the next day, perfect for snow mobiling apart from there was no snow. Quad biking was arranged instead. It was brilliant fun travelling down the valley over frozen streams, snow, mud, dirt, fields i got the bike clem and i were sharing stuck in the stream at one point when the 3 inch ice broke.The following day we walked up to the local ski lift and went to the look out point, spectacular, we then got chased down the hill by a group of small birds.They persued us for about 30 minutes. We returned to Irkutsk the next day and looked around for a few hours before getting on the next train, the train to Ulaanbaatar the capital of Mongolia.
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