One of the coolest parts of my trip to Baikal was the time I spent in the village of Huzhir on Olkhon Island. This little, shabby village is the largest settlement on the island, and, in the absence of good jobs that the fishing industry used to provide, it is trying to reinvent itself as a tourist destination. It's going to take some serious work and a lot of time, though, before Huzhir is a resort town, but it's remoteness and uncivilized atmosphere are the things that I'll remember the most. It isn't easy at all to get to Huzhir; it's a five-hour ride in an uncomfortable minibus, plus a ferry or hovercraft transfer across the straight that separates the island from the mainland. There isn't a paved road on the whole island, and there are more cows than people roaming the dusty streets of Huzhir. We actually saw a stray dog chase a pair of cows down an alley without a single other person in sight. Here are a few pictures of the strange little town that is Huzhir.

One of the wide streets 

The street our hostel was on 

 A store

Trying out a Russian pose 

The local hospital. Not a place I would want to go. 

The fish factory. It doesn't look to prosperous.  

A nice street.... 

Huzhir--where cars go to die. 

Some locals 

 An inviting cafe that also rents rooms

View toward the Little Sea 

 The post office

The library

I just got back from a rafting trip with my host family and their friends. I'm totally sunbaked and a bit worn out, but it was a great time. My host dad woke me up at 6:00am on Thursday (when a big Russian guy wearing an МВД России shirt comes into your room and says "подъем," you don't waste any time getting out of bed). We piled into a jam-packed Volga sedan and picked up a few other people, transferred our things to a beat-up Gazelle van and set off to the Kolp River near the village of Kopreevo (if you put the Russian река колпь владимирская область into Google Maps you can see where we were). We arrived, assembled our four boats (they are collapsible canoe-type things made of canvas stretched over an aluminium frame), and hit the water. We went down the river for about two hours and reached our stopping point. There was a nice pavilion and plenty of room to pitch tents. We spent all day Friday there just relaxing. This involved eating, sunbathing, playing volleyball, and drinking vodka (a lot of that last thing). Then this morning we set off again and rowed down the river for about three hours to the village of Kolp, where our Gazelle was waiting for us. After disassembling our boats while getting eaten alive by clouds of mosquitoes, we took off for Vladimir. It was a great trip, and it was really relaxing to be totally disconnected from the world and surrounded by nature. I didn't bring any book or any electronic device (that's what happens when you toss stuff into a bag at 6am while someone tells you to hurry up in Russian), and, although I was a bit panicked at the thought of how I was going to occupy myself for 72 hours with some people who are old enough to be my parents and who don't speak any English, it turned out to be really fun.

On a different note, I can't ignore the news coming out of my hometown--the rescue of three girls who had been kidnapped and held hostage for ten years. The story is one part miraculous and uplifting and one part horrifying and chilling. I learned about the girls' rescue on Tuesday while I was killing time using the wifi in a Moscow mall while waiting for the train to Vladimir. I remember when Gina DeJesus's and Amanda Berry's kidnappings happened (I've always been a lover the Metro section of the Plain Dealer), and I've seen the missing person's posters hanging on telephone poles on humble corners on the west side. I think I've even driven down Seymour Avenue, not knowing the hell lurking inside one of the little wooden houses. It's heartening that these girls were returned to freedom, that the unspoken popular opinion that these girls were gone forever was rebutted. Justice won in the end.

As I was reading through the coverage, I realized that Gina DeJesus and I are the same age. That brought the heinousness of the the crime into sobering reality. All that I've experienced in the last ten years--the places I've traveled, the things I've learned, the people I've met, the sights I've seen--those girls were deprived of the freedom to experience any of that. My friend is studying to work in the Russian prison system, to work with the dregs of Russian society, and he once told me his philosophy that there is only a thin barrier between the comfortable life most of us live and hell on Earth and that everything can change in an instant. How many times did those girls play back in their minds the moment that the got into their kidnapper's car? I can't say that I believe in fate, but life is certainly a fickle thing. One little decision, one little pause can change everything. I'm thankful for all the opportunities I've had, and I wish the girls and their families all the best.

Here are few pictures from my rafting trip:

  

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.