Crosstown traffic, I dont need to run over you

N 52 16.727 E 104 17.030 Monday 29 September 2008 - Irkutsk

Ok, here I was writing about Olkhon and now I'm back in Irkutsk again and I still haven't written about Olkhon yet. We haven't really had internet except for a brief bit to do a quick email check last Thursday and before that it was back in the cafe in Moscow, wow, I think that was like 7-8 days ago. I'm not really sure. I suspect that Mongolia might have longer gaps, although I am assuming that there will be loads of internet cafes in Ulaanbaatar. We still don't know what we are doing there yet, we leave tomorrow night and then will have to set up something when we get there. Probably we will try to meet up with some other people, maybe some of the people we met on Olkhon, or maybe some people we meet there, and then set up some sort of group thing, find a guide/driver and see what we can do over the next three weeks.

But I'm really starting to see the value, or maybe desire, to start finding other people to travel with, or hang out with, or even just talking and planning together. Scandinavia wasn't so horribly difficult, things didn't feel so foreign. I guess even St Petersburg and Moscow felt ok but sort of more out in the wild, it feels a bit better to group up a little bit, or feel a little less isolated and peculiar. Mongolia especially seems a bit full on, a large span of time (three weeks) and a really large country (one of the largest in the world), it has been comforting to have talked to others who have been there and who are going there and talk about possibly meeting up and trying to travel together for a bit.

Hostels seem to be pretty good for that sort of thing. The first night we were in Irkutsk we met a few couples and had dinner out with them. They might not be in Mongolia at the same time though, some were heading the other way too. The four we met in Olkhon, they had met because two of them heard somebody speaking English on the train platform and just tagged along. The fact they they also spoke Russian probably helped too. Then we met the four of them on a expedition in Olkhon and possibly our itineraries will match up, I guess we will see.

Anyways, I probably haven't had a very representative view of Siberia yet. From the train, what we went through looks vast and barren and covered with lots of pretty trees, but this is probably a slightly unusual part of it. I'm not so fond of Irkutsk yet. It feels a bit like a dumpy town, all the bad parts of a town, horrendous traffic, run down buildings, pollution, and the rest of that. It does have a gigantic statue of Lenin just outside our window. Although I could probably say that about almost any town in Russia. Lenina is the main street as well as Karl Marx Street. I wonder if they will end up changing the street names eventually. There are still quite a few red stars all over Russia too, I guess they will probably remain too. I can't say that I actually have any impressions of Irkutsk yet, a few interesting wooden buildings and houses like in the rest of Siberia (and basically the same sort we saw in rural areas since we crossed over from Finland) and there was what we saw running around trying to get the computer cable fixed.

The real action has been outside of town, by the lake, in the lake. I'm not sure Olkhon, the large island in the middle of Lake Baikal is very representative either. Maybe it is but I guess I see Siberia as having lots more trees, or at least something a bit different. But let's see, Lake Baikal, it is massive. Blah blah, the guidebook says it holds 20% of the fresh water supply in the world, deepest lake in the world, or something like that. Also, apparently you could fit Ireland into it. The island is pretty big too, 100 km long by 15 wide. It has a few hundred people living on it, I think about 1/3 Russian (in the towns) and 2/3 Buryat (a lot of the ranchers/fishermen who live outside the towns in small groups)

It was a former gulag (1000 Lithuanians who were forced to do hard labor in a fish factory. It is funny thinking the island seems so beautiful (or even Siberia) when life is so harsh here and so many people have been forced to live here over the years when it was basically like sending people away to the Moon. They didn't need a whole lot of guards, even though the water freezes up and can be walked over (driven over) for a few months in the winter. Once you get to the mainland, then where do you go, you are thousands of kilometers away from anything and there are plenty of wolves and bears to make your probably short remaining life exciting.

Our adventure started by trying to get there. The bus station is about a 30 minute walk away from the center of town. We went armed with a note, "two seats to Olkhon" in Russian (DBA MECTO NA ONBXOH, I have no idea how to make the letters the way they really were), and a vague time as to when buses leave, or the minibuses. The big bus leaves earlier, is slower, well mostly it leaves earlier. When we get there, we can't figure out where they go from, which one, and it is a bit of a panic. If you miss something here, generally there isn't another one for another day (or more). After showing the note to a lot of people, one person finally points us across the street to a waiting van. It hasn't left yet, in fact it isn't full yet so it won't leave until all the seats are filled (or more). We did time it right and got on early and had to wait but didn't have the risk of having to find another way there.

It was a rather hair raising ride at times. Russian driving is a bit scary and there were lots of incidents of passing on blind corners, blind hills, passing even though the car coming the other way had to swerve onto the shoulder, well, it all seems pretty normal. And then racing on really slippery gravel roads next to sharp drop-offs, well, that made me a bit nervous at times. We did get pulled over by a police officer. Well, I should say that one was standing by the side of the road and merely pointed his baton towards the side of the road. The driver saw him way before, slowed down a lot, and put on his seat-belt before getting there and got waved over. They talked a bit behind the van and then the officer took a peek inside the van and we were off. I wonder how much he had to pay him. We hear the going rate is something like 1000 rubles.

The scenery was really amazing on the way. Once we got out of town, with its mad traffic, well the traffic is still a bit mad on the main road. We pass through pretty flat plains, grasslands (probably former forest land) and small settlements and a few marshy areas with yellowing larch and birch in the distance. The second half, we turn towards the lake and start climbing over the hills surrounding the lake and pass even more large patches of woodland, also in full autumn mode. Occasionally we come across trees with bits of cloth and other things tied to them.

The bus ride is about 6 hours, so we see a lot of trees. Also the passengers are a bit of a cast of characters. There are a few tourists, a Swiss couple who are jammed in the back with the two drunkards. One of them seems to hold his alcohol pretty well, he is dressed in camoflauge and I think of him as 'the mercenary'. He apologizes a lot for his friend, or at least I think that is what he is doing. Both of them showed up already completely drunk (9 am) when they boarded the bus, and they both have enough supplies with them to maintain that the entire journey. The other one is barely able to walk, stand, sit, or really anything. He is three rows back so we can only sort of smell him but we do hear him quite a bit. The Swiss get the worst of it, being by him the entire journey. He blabs the entire time, keeps drinking and is generally just a bit unpleasant. I am quite happy that he never ends up vomiting or anything like that. Maybe that would have been a tragic waste of alcohol.

There was also a sulky goth looking girl, who gets off halfway there. And a few other Asian looking locals, two of them are sick and cough on us in the row behind for the entire journey. In front is a mother with her two small children. And we can't forget our heroic driver, who just speeds and races on the gravel roads and generally makes me rather nervous about it all. Maybe the padded ceiling on the bus (eerily like the inside of a coffin lid) is needed in some occasions.

The journey is pretty ok though. The scenery is really pretty, changing from flat grassy lands (saw what we through were a few eagles, too big to be buzzards we thought but can't find them in small bird book we have) to the hilly forests and onto the island over the ferry which was barren and rocky and also beautiful in its own way. We arrive at Nikita's, which I guess everybody starts out there. We heard a few negative things about it the night before at the hostel so thought we might just stay one night and decide the next day whether to stay there or try a home stay somewhere or what.

I guess it was just easier there. Maybe it would have been a little less expensive somewhere else, and maybe somehow it was all a little less genuine, whatever that means. It was a bit of a tourist center and all. The meals were all included (lots of omul), much of the housing had been purpose built, they put on music events in the evening, you know, here is a gen-u-wine experience. I'm not sure I had much interaction with many locals and things were mostly in English. It was quite nice though for the other people there, and it was in the middle of this amazing island to explore.

The island seems to be a dog paradise. Packs of them wander around all over. Some look quite mean and those seem to be tied up outside as guard dogs, a lot of others seem to be lying around in the middle of the streets, or wrestling with other dogs, all vaguely attached to some or other humans. The homestead seemed to have about 5-6 who seemed to make it their center.

How to sum up a few days on the island then? C had caught a nasty cold and wasn't at her best for those days (I blame it on those guys coughing on us all the way there, even though that's way too quick for something to manifest) so we took it slowly the first few days with some walks around the cliffs and beaches and short walks into the woods. Disappointingly, the nearby woods seem to mostly be plantation trees, mostly Scot Pine, the really pretty larch seems to be on the far side of the island. We meant to rent bikes and have a ride around the island that way, but we never really got ourselves together in time for that.

Probably the nicest thing we did was the tour up to the north point of the island. I suppose most everybody does that one, but it is pretty nice. 10 of us in a big green van, or whatever you would call it. I was slightly worried when the driver was pumping up a tire with a hand pump, but I guess that's kind of normal. Considering the state of the roads we went over and the way it kept going over all of them without any sort of apparent problem, that thing could probably drive over anything. At one point during the day, we pulled somebody in a car out of some deep sand, which due to a lack of much vegetation on the west side of the island seems to drift quite deeply even fairly far inland.

He was a pretty good guide, lots of interesting details. He only spoke Russian but luckily there a few in the group who could translate. On the way up, we went past the former gulag, where the former fish factory has since been razed to the ground and is slowly being covered in drifting sand. I found myself caught in thinking it was such a beautiful place, an only slightly cold day in late September, waves washing through the former pier and onto a sandy beach, the high hills across the lake filled with yellowing larches and birch with clouds settling down on the higher parts of the hills. How is it to come somewhere like this on a holiday and think it is lovely when so many others had been trapped here against their will, forced to work long hours in horrible conditions, in extreme weather conditions, with no real hope of ever being able to leave and go home.

The north side of the island looks out over the vast expanse of the lake. The west side, the side we were staying on, it is only a few kilometers to the mainland, while the east side is up to 15-20 kilometers to shore and hundreds to the end of the lake to the north. So much of it here reminded me of being on the coast of Wales or Scotland looking out to sea. The rocks are quite special up on this side of the island too, white granite covered with patches of red lichen. The effect is quite striking and is rather famous. We had stopped 4-5 times at different places heading up here, to look at different things and have short walks.

I had been wondering about the poles and trees covered in cloth. He explained some of that to us at one of the stops, it was a Baryat thing. Poles in the ground, they were used as hitching posts for horses and it was a tradition to leave some sort of indication that you were there, tying on a bit of the clothing you were wearing, or leaving something, a cigarette, or whatever. The poles vaguely memorialize families, a pole per family, and as you sat there, you might think about the families, flick a bit of vodka in that direction. I'm still a little unclear who follows this, is it the Baryat or the Russians or has it just become a little more mainstream and a nice custom? I know the buses and cars, at certain ones of these would slow down and people would chuck out kopeks out the window at it. Considering a ruble is worth about £0.02 and a kopek is 1/100th of that, it is probably a rather cheap thing to chuck out the window.

Ok, I got busy and now it is many days later. I started a bit here, maybe I'll leave that and then sum up quickly since I haven't been in Russia for a few days now and am about to leave for 10 days in the Gobi.

Once we got to the north side of the island, we were let out, hike that way to the tip and then come back through the woods to lunch. So blah blah blah, great hikes, along the cliffs. The lake is amazing looking, so huge. The white granite with the red lichen is really pretty. The hike through the larch forest was good, the needles changing colors and some have already dropped. Just the perfect time to hike through a forest like that. Lunch was waiting for us, a really tasty fish stew and bread and cheese and butter and a nice hot pot of tea (Siberian coffee - I like that Russia is pretty tea mad).

The drive back was pretty, somewhat exhausting though. The roads are a bit mad in places and we were shaken all over. In the drive back, we have acquired some new friends and start planning the next parts of our trip, seeing if we will meet and be able to travel together some more.

It was sad to leave the island then the next day. Although it isn't always easy. We had booked on the minibus which seems to have been overbooked, so a few people couldn't ride on it. The normal bus then had been canceled that day, so the ones on that couldn't come either. They ended up finding other rides to the ferry and then had to wait a few hours for the normal bus on the other side. The bus we were on was mostly the people we had met on the island so it was a totally different time than on the ride up, nice conversations and all that.

The next day, our last day in Irkutsk, the weather turns, it gets cold and finally feels a lot like Siberia. We are not terribly ambitious, a bit of internet cafe trying to sort out what will happen once we get to Mongolia. Just a word of warning, don't send 4 emails to guest-houses in Mongolia asking if they have vacancies and then take off on a train and don't have time to get their replies. We are a bit surprised when there are 4 people waiting for us at 6 am in Ulaanbaatar, ready to take us to their guest-houses. Oops.

Sadly the train ride into Mongolia, we really didn't see much. By the time we got on it and out of Irkutsk, it had gotten dark and was dark all the way around the lake and until after we got to Ulan Ude. We have some pretty scenery then after that but then quickly get to the border crossing and it is all over then. That had to be one of the most surreal experiences in terms of train travel for me. So, it is like 20 km from the last town in Russia to the first town in Mongolia, yet it took us about 10 hours to cover it.

We sit in the Russian station for a few hours, they had disconnected the engine and left only the two carriages destined for Ulaanbaatar sitting on the tracks in front of the station. And then let us sit for a few hours, like 3 hours at this point. Then the train fills up with Mongolians. We had lucked out and our room, 4 bunks, we were alone and had it to ourselves. So, it was a little of an adjustment to having two others in there, and two that we had to work hard to communicate with. Like the Russian phrase book, the Mongolian one is pretty pathetic, and this one doesn't even have a small section of Mongolian to English, just scattered phrases and then an English to Mongolian section. Very frustrating. They were quite nice though, I think on their way back from a big shopping trip, they had many bags of clothes and towels and things like that.

And we sit there. After like 4 hours or so, the Russians fill the train, collecting passports, handing out customs forms and then disappear for another hour or so. Their last burst before they finally let our train reassemble itself and acquire an engine again is a proper intense search. They do search our stuff in a fairly cursory manner, but the compartments themselves get a pretty thorough treatment. Twice they clear us out and they climb all over it searching every where. I wonder what they though they might find there that they wouldn't find in our bags (drugs, weapons, people?). Funny having a search like that in leaving a country.

We creep through the next section, the actual border crossing looks like a real border, barbed wire, towers, the whole deal, and then we sit in a fenced in no man's land for a while before then slowly creeping on over the border and into Mongolia. This part is actually really lovely, hills, water, trees, and lots of pretty things to look at. Our Mongolian roommates are quite excited too, looking a lot and urging us to take lots of pictures of things. Then we reach the first station in Mongolia and it starts all over again. A few hours sitting there, waiting for them to take passports, do customs inspections and the rest of that. Eventually they do, which doesn't then take that long and isn't as intense as the Russian one (or as apparently it used to be, tearing apart compartments, searching absolutely everything, etc) and the inspector even smiles and says welcome to Mongolia when he is done. Our new Mongolian friends then disappear and we then wait and wait until the train will move again. By the time it does, it is 10 pm and way past dark, and we don't see anything more of Mongolia since our train gets to Ulaanbaatar at 6 am before it gets light. We got to that last stop in Russia around 1 pm too and feel totally exhausted from sitting around for so long doing absolutely nothing.

Anyways, that was days ago (now 4 October 2008 in UB), I'll have to finish the rest later. We leave UB tomorrow morning for a 10 day trip around the Gobi with the 4 people we had met in Siberia. They are really nice and it should be really good. We have been in UB for three days now and I have just started to get the hang of dealing with crossing the street (a rather lethal and scary thing to do). The town itself doesn't seem to be much to be excited about. A lot of our time here so far has been organizing things for the tour. But I should see about finishing the packing and getting some sleep, it is a long drive tomorrow (as many of the days will be) and I'm excited to get going.