I write this in the early hours, from Hanoi, Vietnam, camped in a hostel dorm room which I have all to myself. Not sure why I stayed up… probably because I have so much catching up to do. Anyway, bon appetite…
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IRKUTSK, Russia
The train to Irkutsk was a long one, and another open cabin affair. The landscape was taking an odd turn, as was the vibe. It became more easterly and less European as we moved closer to the ‘Sinosphere’, the area of Chinese and Asian influence. Things seemed wilder out here, less controlled. In many respects, it was refreshing. From the heavy Eastern European decor of the west, we began to move to pockets of wood-frame constructions, their roofs and eaves heavy with snow, silent against the background of endless pine forests. Small towns and villages litter the edge of the Trans-Siberian at this leg of the journey, occasioned by the odd dirty old factory still churning out whatever anonymous product it is allotted to produce. They hug close to this thin iron vein of immense commercial importance, and out in this wilderness one wonders how they would survive if one day it inexplicably disappeared.
We had bought stuff for the train from a decent local supermarket, mostly dried noodles, and some fruit. We started eating immediately after we’d pulled out of the station, surrounded by a group of old women who, upon seeing our mediocre fare, instantly began producing food for us (motherly instinct kicks in for most women, I think, when they see a couple of young guys not eating ‘properly’). The first produced a beetroot and potato salad, which was really tasty, and also gave us a large pickled gherkin each. Another gave us half a loaf of bread. We were also offered some beautiful sweet cakes filled with something like caramel. This sort of generosity is so typical of the Russians; there are some that are wonderfully friendly and generous, and yet there are others that seem irredeemably cold and reserved. It is, fundamentally, a country of incredible extremes. We were very grateful to the women, and although we could not speak much to them, we could communicate our gratitude, and we shared with them what we could, our tea and sweets.
On the train we bumped into Steve, the Australian, who was pleased to return a good quality knife to Dave, a knife which he’d misplaced at Napoleon Hostel in Moscow. He thought it was permanently lost, but it turns out that a woman at their reception had found it after we’d left, and passed it on to Steve, since she thought he’d be heading our way. This was a stroke of luck. That evening we went back to his cabin and played cards with him, Richard (who coincidentally had also caught this train) and an Italian couple who were following the same route that we were. The game of choice was El Presidente, or Arsehole, or Presidents & Arseholes, or whatever you might choose to call it. It’s a fun game, anyway.
Eventually, after a long, long journey across a barren landscape, we pulled into Irkutsk and set off to find our hostel, Baikaler, which was easily discovered after a quick hop on the tram. As per the usual, we’d booked a couple of nights there using HostelBookers.com. This is a superb website, as it happens, and far superior to HostelWorld.com, which charges a small (but not inconsiderable) service charge for each booking. HostelBookers provides a rating system complete with user comments, and we’ve found that most of the places we’ve booked through there have generally conformed to the ratings on the site.
Anyway, scattering our stuff about the place, we settled in. One thing I’ve noticed about hostels is that although the quality of the staff does not necessarily dictate the quality of the stay, the more engaging and friendly and helpful they tend to be, the more likely it is that the hostel is traveller-on-a-budget friendly, rather than plain exploitative and money-grabbing, such as I felt Napoleon Hostel to be. The staff were very friendly, right from the start, and there were no ridiculous arbitrary charges. It was also pretty cheap. Plus, the staff were good conversation… for example, I chatted to a Russian girl who worked there, who spoke excellent English (and French too, it seemed), about jazz music (pretentious? moi?) and her life in Uzbekistan for a fair while, and she didn’t charge me once.
Irkutsk is a very cold city in late November. Most days hovered around -15°C. That said, the weather we experienced gave us clear blue skies, and this meant good photography for the photographers (Steve, Dave and Rich), and pleasant walks for myself. The city itself lies on a large river, which was in part frozen over. There is little beautiful scenery around the river, however, for it is ringed with factories and smokestacks, belching out heavy grey clouds. Smog hangs over the city for the most part, as with most cities in Russia… manufacturing economies, especially ex-socialist ones with strong utilitarian, functionalist traditions, will not skimp on profit or productivity for the sake of aesthetic pleasure. Western tourists are not expected in the middle of nowhere, and their good opinion of the scenery is neither sought after nor catered for. That said, around the city there are lots of wonderful old wooden buildings, their eaves and gates decorated with carvings, to take the wandering eye. Most of these buildings seem to be a good century old, apparently lacking decent heating and plumbing, and yet many appear to still be inhabited. A lot of them look near to collapse, the walls buckling and some slanting downwards in dangerous fashion, but no-one seems to care very much. Such is Russia, really.
Our stay in Irkutsk was not a dull one. At the very first we were engaged in planning for a trip to Nikita’s Homestead on Olkhon Island with the New Zealand couple, the Italian couple, Steve and Richard, and also Karla, a girl who was staying in Irkutsk and who was keen to come along. The idea had first been mooted in Moscow by Leanne & Blair, and we’d been planning via email since then to get to Nikita’s and stay a couple of nights. Nikita’s sounded like a fairly cheap, pretty authentic way to experience the Siberian lifestyle: spending time on an isolated island at the homestead of Nikita, an ex-Soviet ping-pong champion (no joke), in the middle of the immense Lake Baikal, with very little running water or electricity, eating family-prepared food and generally slowing the pace of life down considerably. Unfortunately it was not to be.
We’d arranged to travel separately by bus to the island, and the journey was to take 8 hours. To get there at a reasonable time, whilst it was still light, meant getting up at an early hour and being at the bus for its departure at 8am. Anyway, we were told to split into two groups: Steve, Karla and the Italian couple in one, and myself, Richard, Dave, and Leanne & Blair in the other. Both groups had different spots to leave from. Ours was near the market. So, we left the next day, very early, but for the life of us we couldn’t find the bus. The streets in Irkutsk were very cold, caked in mucky snow, and wild with traffic and random shoddy-looking taxis and buses. With no clear idea what we were looking for, where we were exactly to be looking for it, and no bus number, we were doomed. Trudging back to the hostel after the appointed leaving time of the bus, we were informed by the staff that the other ‘team’ had left already. Myself, Dave and Richard gave up at that point because we could only spare three days, and two days wasn’t enough to reach the island and see it properly, i.e. we’d arrive one day and return the next, and the thought of 16 hours driving in the freezing wastes over two days wasn’t an exciting prospect, nor a fun way to spend one’s time in Siberia. Leanne & Blair, however, decided to try again the next morning.
Somewhat deflated, we planned to console ourselves with a good dinner. To this end, I chatted to the girl at the hostel about cheap places to eat, and she recommended a Chinese restaurant that was quite well hidden. Hidden to such an extent that it was ‘behind a door’. I’m not sure whether she was being deliberately ironic, or deliberately cryptic, but lots of things are ‘behind a door’ and its quite hard to narrow down a restaurant with that sort of information to go on, especially in a city where an open-air restaurant would be an extremely unlikely find. But anyway, with further instructions we eventually found the restaurant which we believed she meant, which did indeed reside behind a door, and it was dead cheap for Russia… 800 roubles between 5 of us, so roughly under £4 each. Appetites sated, we returned to the hostel.
The next morning Leanne & Blair decided to have another plug at finding the bus. They succeeded this time, but we were under the impression that they hadn’t when they trudged back through the door at 10am. It turns out that buses in Irkutsk are partial to ramming as many people in as possible, regardless of the number of seats, and since they were such small buses (barely classifiable as a mini-bus, more like a people-carrier) the prospect of spending 8 hours squashed into a tiny space with some stranger’s arse in their face didn’t appeal to them, strangely enough. So, they resigned themselves to missing the island.
Thoughts now turned towards the future. Myself, Dave, Rich and Steve (as far as we knew) were set on travelling onwards to Ulaanbaatur, Mongolia. We’d already booked our train tickets at the station with the help of an exceptionally useful note given to us by one of the members of staff (for free) telling the cashier exactly what we wanted. Now, having examined the sightseeing fare in Ulaanbaatur, and after chatting to the staff at Baikaler, we were discussing the possibility of going on a tour to the Mongolian countryside/outback through the Golden Gobi, a hostel recommended to us by the Baikaler staff. The website fired our imaginations, especially the idea of staying in a Ger (Russians and Westerners often refer to them as Yurts) and doing some horse-trekking. Upon sharing our possible intentions with Leanne & Blair, this immediately caused a seed of doubt for them about their travel plans. The horse-trekking appealed to Leanne especially, she being a prolific rider, and I think both of them weren’t so keen on spending more time in Russia than they needed to, it being expensive, cold, and also in some important respects quite miserable. Eventually, after booking and then cancelling some tickets, they had decided to join us and come down to Ulaanbaatur rather than completing the Trans-Siberian for the sake of it (taking the train to Vladivostock before flying on to Beijing).
We also made a number of changes in our plans over these few days. Originally we were booked to take the train from Irkutsk to Ulaanbaatur, which cost around £80. Now we were astutely advised by the extremely kind and helpful Russian girl not to do this, as it would be much cheaper to go by train to Ulan Ude instead, a bit further along the Trans-Siberian line, and then catch a bus for 1000 roubles (around £20) across the border to Ulaanbaatur central. We changed tickets, and this saved us around £50 altogether, for which we owe her a big debt of gratitude.
After the return of Leanne & Blair from the bus myself, Rich and Dave took a wander around the city. It was a pretty unremarkable walk, apart from the interesting presence of large iceblocks stacked up near the entrance to a park (apparently for the building of an ‘ice city’, which sounds cool), but it is worth mentioning for an odd Irkutski, or perhaps Russian Orthodox, tradition that we stumbled across upon the way. We’d been wandering near to an attractive Russian Orthodox church, and coincidentally there were for some reason three to four weddings going on at around the same time. Wandering past the church and towards a footbridge that led towards the rivers edge, over a small highway, we noticed that a couple of newlyweds with their entourage were attaching something to the railings of this bridge to much encouragement, via honking and beeping, of the cars and trucks below. Intrigued, we waited until they’d walked further over the bridge to get a closer look. It turned out to be a standard lock. The symbolism of a lock in this respect is fairly obvious (i.e. it reflects the couple’s desire for a secure marriage, for security for the future, and it perhaps also is symbolic of the unbreakable seal of their love) but to have a tradition whereby one attaches a lock to this specific bridge is oddly quaint, and quite sweet. Their’s was a fairly standard lock by contrast to the others, and it seems that a minor industry has been geared up towards this tradition; locks of various sizes and age adorned the railings, some rust-free, some weathered with age, but most came with engravings naming the bride and groom. One was even shaped like a heart.
We took lunch at ‘Am-Bar’, a self-service restaurant that was very cheap by Russian standards, and with relatively good food. The fact that we didn’t have to pay for food by weight was a welcome relief, and we were pleased to be able to get a good feed for around £3. Food in Irkutsk, it seemed, is a lot cheaper than the rest of Russia. That evening, after dinner, we got exceptionally drunk on vodka with a young Japanese guy who’d just finished a Masters at Dublin University, and who was now travelling from Ireland back to Japan. He was destroyed after a few shots. We carried on, chatting between ourselves, and after a good few bottles (which even saw Rich airing his supposed ‘Marijuana Vodka’… of dubious narcotic worth), time, tiredness and the physical effects of alcohol eventually forced us to bed.
The next day was spent wandering around the city. I ambled up to a pretty awesome park, and a large, attractive orthodox church, both overlooking the city, to stretch my legs, get some fresh air, and take some photos. The park was nice, coated in snow, and near to the church were clusters of wooden houses and a large bombastic monument to the Revolution, with greenish, ruddy-faced Comrades carrying a red-painted stone flag high above them. This was cool. There was also a small cemetery, complete with Soviet stars on gravestones, including the only gravestone with an aircraft-propeller for ornamentation that I’ve ever seen. That evening, to make up for missing Olkhon Island, myself, Dave, Leanne & Blair and Rich planned to visit the Lake Baikal the next day.
Rising early, we headed out to the Lake by a bus which, luckily, was quite easy to find. The bus also wasn’t completely rammed, thank god, and after driving for 2 hours we arrived at our destination. Next to us stood Lake Baikal, an immense flat sheet of metal, the opposite shore impossible to view, holding 20% of the world’s fresh water supply. It was huge, and magnificent, and an obvious photo opportunity for the peeps with cameras. That day we planned to do some husky riding in the morning (sledging, not literally riding a dog… which in most cultures would be considered cruel), and then spend the afternoon in a banya (banya is the Russian word for sauna). With our awesome itinerary, and after stopping for a quick coffee at the roadside café, we headed down a dirt track past some impressive looking wooden houses towards the husky riding centre. Upon arrival all of the dogs (they were definitely dogs, not huskies, although this didn’t seem to matter much) stood up and started barking in unison, perched on top of their kennels. Thankfully they were chained to them. The place smelt gamey and musky, with overtones of dog shit, but what else could one expect? It also provided our first experience of a ‘long drop’, an outside toilet dug into the ground, where one relieves oneself and tries not to look at everyone else’s relieve-ings beneath them. If you do look, however, be prepared to see a construction not unlike the pyramids at Giza… except in this instance, made out of shit. Yep, a frozen pyramid of shit. My immediate fear was falling in and then being impaled on that shit. In that instance I’d not envy the police officer back in the UK charged with informing my mother that I’d died in Siberia after being stabbed to death by faeces. Actually I’d not really envy myself in that situation, either. A messy way to go.
Musings aside, we each took a turn at riding the ‘husky’ sledge (except for Rich, who opted out). This was an experience, a very good one as it turns out. I can’t say that the UK heath & safety inspectors would approve, but as far as I’m aware none of us died or were seriously maimed, so that wasn’t much of an issue. The sledging was incredibly fun. You speed along at around 15-20 mph, trying to maintain balance and to not fall off as they drag you over the ruts, bumps, and lumps in the snow-covered track. We sped through a beautiful forest, the crisp sunlight coming down through the trees and on to the pure white snow, and with the wind rushing past and the acceleration of the sledge it was quite exhilarating. Admittedly I did bounce off the sledge once, although I kept a hold of the handles and managed to quickly run back onto it whilst it was still being dragged along, and get my feet back in to position. More than once the thought of how to explain away a broken leg to my insurance company popped into my head (random fall in a forest?), but nothing untoward happened and we rushed back, after what seemed to be an incredibly quick five kilometre run, into the camp. Altogether only Dave and Blair properly went for a tumble, with no injuries, although admittedly Dave’s fall was due to the dogs going ape and fighting one another towards the end of the run… which was funny to watch. Dave didn’t seem to mind much either really.
We finished up the sledging, and then spent the afternoon in a banya. Rich abandoned us to take some photos, so we all changed into swimwear and braved a (relatively cool) 70 degree sauna together. It felt good to feel some proper heat, and we even managed to get some birch-tree action going on (in saunas, birch leaves act as a form of natural fragrance, and open up pores, or something, when they’re smacked against your skin). Sweating like a mother, I walked outside and quickly lowered my now well-raised internal body temperature by rolling around in the snow outside. This starts to get very uncomfortable very quickly (the feeling is similar to having thousands of needles pressed in to your skin), so you have to run back inside to quickly feel the warmth again. Refreshed from the banya, with a feeling of warmth, we left Lake Baikal in a shared taxi (the buses were too busy to catch), and returned to Irkutsk. That evening, me and Dave shared some smoked fish from Lake Baikal. We had to gut it ourselves, which was a messy business, but it was all cured and so the insides didn’t have much left to them. We ate the fish by chopping in into segments and pulling the flesh off from the skin with our teeth, which is the only real way to eat the fish since the skin is incredibly difficult to peel off from the flesh by hand. It was very tasty, but far too messy to eat regularly.
On mine and Dave’s last night in Irkutsk, much to our surprise, we found for dinner a reasonably priced Russian restaurant selling bona fide, tasty Russian food, to which we went with Leanne & Blair. I ate a tasty bowl of Solianka soup, which is meaty and oily, and grilled Omul, a native fish of Lake Baikal that I later (embarrassingly) discovered is being fished to extinction. Well, you’re only human… and considering I’m a Westerner, I’ve already donated my fair share of existence to screwing the global ecosystem over, so it’s probably a drop in the ocean as opposed to the straw that broke the camel’s back. If God’s a fish, however, I’m screwed. In the evening we drank vodka and watched Dr. Strangelove, my personal choice and one of my favourite movies, which I had the pleasure of introducing to Blair and Rich. Dr. Strangelove is a comedy about nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union. The fact that it’s bloody funny, and yet it concerns nuclear war, is testament to its genius. It’s Peter Sellers at his best, and I recommend you watch it if you haven’t already (watch it again, in that case). Sitting in Irkutsk, watching a Cold War nuclear comedy, was a gloriously surreal experience.
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