We had been looking forward to pitching our new tent since we left the beaches of Greece exactly a month ago. We were off to explore this natural wonder in Eastern Siberia and we kept staring at our pocket map, amazed at just how far overland we had come.
Lake Baikal is the world's oldest (50 million years) and deepest (1,600 metres) lake, holding 20% of all freshwater supplies on earth. Olkhon is its biggest island and where we chose to concentrate our time. It reminded Phil of West Scotland for the first few days until we hit open steppe and wooden farmsteads. Forests, cliffs, grassy plains, rugged beaches, sandy beaches...and the purest icy waters for morning wake-up dips. Legend says that jumping into Lake Baikal will add 25 years to your life expectancy so we're well on our way to 200!
We trekked the 50km up to the northernmost tip of the island at a very leisurely pace, using our stove until it conked out and then building camp fires to cook up our limited supplies of oats and noodles. We had seen very few people until the end of our trip when we walked into a tiny village set into a steep valley at sunset and saw two brightly-coloured tents pitched slightly up and away from the pebbly beach. Leon, a banjo-playing cyclist from Bavaria owned one tent and the other belonged to Nir and Vania, two academics living in Manchester, from Israel and Bosnia-Herzogovina.
We immediately struck up lively conversations and spent the next two days swapping stories, walking the 6km round-trip to a local farm to buy odd-tasting dairy products that turned our stomachs, pooling our leftover food, hustling bread from the village and cooking together on our camp fire.
A hitching adventure resulted in us cracking open the emergency ration of minstrels after slogging 20 km with full packs without a whisper of a ride. Eventually a van filled with omul (trout-like fish and local speciality) took us out of the wilderness to the nearest village from where we caught a 7 hour bus, not without a breakdown on the way, back to civilisation for the next leg of our Trans-Siberian journey.
Cant work out what Phil is sitting next to here, or have we missed something. Granma and I are taking another look at your travels and are amazed by the space and the distance you have travelled.
ReplyDeletelots of love
xxx
It's a roadside Buddhist shrine Liz. People come to it with offerings of brightly coloured flags, coins and cigarettes. For us it was a good place for a much-needed breather.
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