Irkutsk with fotos

We left Ulaanbaatar for Irkutsk. Crossed the Mongolian/Russian border which was a bit exciting. The Russian soldiers marching in and checking passports with humorless eyes and gaunt faces was a little unnerving… until I looked outside and saw a bunch of them outside the train building a snowman.

We started to see snow which was strange. I didn’t expect any for quite a while. Luckily it died down to a trickle and we arrived in Irkutsk.

The travel company I arranged a good number of our tickets through had send the remaining tickets to an Irkutsk travel agency called the Baikal Complex. I had just an address and I had planned to meet with John, a guy we had met in the Terelj camp who had taken a faster train the day after we left. We got into a cab and negotiated a price, which turned out to be way way too much since the hotel we were going to so we could withdraw cash and change dollars was only about 2 kilometers away. We found another cab after that and found out that the Baikal complex was about 15 kilometers outside of town and outside of our ability to take public transportation so we negotiated a price to have a cab driver take us there and then to the train station to meet John. After much difficulty we found the complex, which was just an apartment. No one was there. It was the weekend so we figured it might just be closed. After heading back we thought we might have missed John so we went into the city to find an internet connection (the backup plan with John was to email each other if there was a change) There the cab driver recommended the Baikaler hostel as a place to stay. Since it was in lonely planet with good reviews we said ok and he called them but they were booked. After checking the internet, John said he was actually arriving much much later since the tickets were in Moscow time, not the local time. We walked uptown to the Downtown hostel who only had a double bed to share. We thought we’d need 3 so they called someone else who showed up and walked us across town to his house.

The house was a bit suspect. It had a big bowl of some decomposing bread/soup/mess on a pedestal and no electricity. There was also no one else there. They were charging the same as the Downtown hostel (500 rubles) so I made up an allergy to his dog and we left just as another couple showed up to stay there.

After walking back to the Downtown hostel we were told the bed had been taken. We continued to walk around in the freezing cold, doing circles around the city with our giant backpacks strapped to us trying to find a place to sleep. We stopped at a couple more hostels/hotels until finally we decided to bite the bullet and go back to the original hotel, hotel Irkutsk that we exchanged money at. The hotel was a bit pricey so it was a last resort, but after a couple hours or wandering around, we had had it.

We checked in and decided we had seen enough of Irkutsk for now and hung out at the hotel for the rest of the day.

The next day we packed up and got onto a bus headed for Listvyanka, the closet port town to Irkutsk bordering Lake Baikal, the largest freshwater lake in the world. After the 1.5 hour bus trip we got off to see the lake which looked more like an ocean.

We walked past an open air market that sold smoked omul, a native fish to Lake Baikal, and hiked up into the main valley about a kilometer to find a place that was listed in the Trans-Siberian handbook. It turns out that the guesthouse, which was more like a hotel, was run by the Baikal complex that had my tickets. We asked if they had room and they asked us for our reservation coupon which of course we did not have. They discussed for a while and then said ok. 500 rubles times 2 later, we climbed up the hill a bit more and went into this 3/4 story brand new wooden house. The rooms were all new, all wood, and all welcoming. Private bathroom, new shower, toilet, and an awesome view of the valley and Lake Baikal were an unexpected treat. After some hot tea and biscuits, we headed back down to grab some omul and check out the village.

We were able to make a phone call home from the main hotel for the bargain price of about 4 bucks a minute =(. Afterwards, we had dinner and went back to our room to relax and watch a movie on my laptop.

The next day, we wandered around the village a bit more and caught the mini-bus back to Irkutsk (60 rubles). We called ahead and made a reservation with Baikaler hostel and checked in. After checking my email again at the local internet café (which charged by the megabyte) and I found out that John and I had been exchanging emails from the same internet café but we were never able to meet (see the St. Petersburg entry). We wandered around the city a bit more and went to go pick up our tickets for the rest of our trip, after which we got ready to move on to Krasnoyarsk.