I've been to Baikal! I just got back from one of the coolest trips I have ever taken--a trip to the world's biggest and deepest lake. I have wanted to go to Baikal for several years, and I saved up money explicitly for that purpose. I went with another teacher, and we left Vladimir on Sunday, April 29. We traveled first to Moscow, where we boarded a plane for the 5.5 hour flight to Irkutsk. Irkutsk surprised us with it beauty and cleanliness; for a Russian city, it is remarkably clean and feels much more international than you would expect for a city in the middle of Siberia. We stayed in Irkutsk for a night and then headed to the resort town of Listvyanka, where we stayed for two nights in a beautiful log-cabin-style hostel. After another night in Irkutsk, we took a minibus for the 6-hour trip to Olkhon Island. 

Olkhon was the most memorable and my most favorite part of the trip. Actually, my time there didn't start well: I ate a cheburek--a little meat-filled pastry--at a gas station along the way (it was a stupid lapse in judgement; everybody in Russia knows that never to eat food prepared in places like gas stations or sketchy roadside cafes), and I got a nasty little case of food poisoning. After puking my guts out in the little town of Huzhir--the main village on the island and the place we stayed--the lady who ran the little hostel we stayed at gave me some charcoal tablets that cured me almost instantly. The next day we set off on an excursion to the northernmost part of the island--a place called Cape Khobboi, which means "jagged tooth" in the the Buryat language. We were so far away from city life; the lady who ran the hostel in town told us the roads to Khobboi were bad--in reality they didn't exist. We bumped along rutted tracks in a little UAZ jeep through some of the most starkly beautiful terrain I have ever seen. 

The next day we returned to Irkutsk, where we explored more of the city before flying back to Moscow and getting home on Tuesday. I'll post a lot more about this trip, but now here are some photos. I'm joining my host family on a canoe trip tomorrow, and we'll be gone until Saturday, so I'll have even more to write about when I return from that trip. 

 The airport in Irkutsk

 Lenin Street in Irkutsk

The Angara River embankment. The Angara carries water out of Baikal.   

 My first glimpse of Baikal was from the window of a minibus to Listvyanka. 

One of my professors called Listvyanka a dreary resort town.  

Russian beach season 

 Smoked omul and beer--essential Baikal food

 Listvyanka sunset

Our hostel in Listvyanka.  

The hostel from the outside 

Baikal has amazingly clear water 

On the way to Olkhon 

Our ride to Olkhon in front of the cafe that gave me food poisoning

 Waiting for the hovercraft for the trip across the straight that separates the mainland from Olkhon

On the hovercraft 

 Our hostel in the little town of Huzhir on Olkhon

 Main Street Huzhir 

 Hanging over the Little Sea--an inlet of Lake Baikal 

 Huzhir--where cows outnumber people 

These little islands are name lion and crocodile  

Our guide and his trusty steed  

 The dock of a former gulag camp on Olkhon 

The buildings of a closed fish factory that stands where the gulag used to be 

 One of the stops on our excursion to the north of the island

 Baikal is still frozen over--the locals say it can take up to another month before the ice is gone 

 Cape Khobboi 

 It feels like you are at the edge of the earth 

 Awesome rock formations 

These big cliffs lead down to the lake, which is about a mile deep just off shore  

 On of the few places on Olkhon where you can access Baikal without scaling a cliff 

Monument in Huzhir  

 Sunset over the Little Sea

 Back in our room on Olkhon 

 A morning hike before out return to Irkutsk 

 The symbol of Irkutsk 

Is this Russia? It's so nice.