Train - Vladivostok to Irkutsk - Day 3

Friday 27^th was our third (and final) day of this part of the trip. When we woke, the train was travelling through the last part of a mountain region (Yablonovy Mountains) that it had crossed while we slept. Shortly after, we stopped at Khilok, a larger town where the principal activity is railway maintenance. We’ve come 3400 km, and it still 5932 km to Moscow!

The scenery is mainly open country, often with distant low hills covered in green fir trees. Small settlements are more common now, with the traditional wooden Siberian houses much less common. There are even some made local roads.

By midday (our time) we pulled into the busy station at Ulan Ude, which was our first large city for some time (about 400,000). Large buildings and apartment blocks replaced the single dwellings surrounded by a wooden fence that had been the norm for two days. While most people looked Russian, we saw some of the local Buryat people, who are ethnically linked to the Mongolians.

The trees has noticeably thicker foliage now and there are more blossoms – obviously spring comes a little earlier here than further east. Outside the big city, every house is a detached dwelling, generally wooden, with a fenced yard and everyone seems to have well-maintained vegetable beds and even greenhouses, though there is no sign of this seasons growth yet.

Light blue has been the predominant colour everywhere, with a very occasional outbreak of green. If it’s painted, it’s painted light blue. Window frames, the base of poles, some walls and fences, railway fittings and even the railings around graves.

Broken ice covers this part of Lake Baikal

By about 3 pm, we had come upon Lake Baikal. Quite unexpectedly, it was covered with broken ice, the remnants of the winter ice covering. As we travelled, we had Lake Baikal on our right and snow covered mountains on our left. After a brief time, the all sign of ice on the lake disappeared and we were left with a wide expanse of still blue water, with the opposite shore visible through the haze.

The train stopped for two minutes at Slyudyanka, where the provonik recommended the omul. So we bought some smoked omul fish and enjoyed it with a sip of vodka.

We continued for three hours to Irkutsk. Where the train arrived exactly on-time and we were met by our guide, Katya.

Katya drove us to Lystvanka, on the shores of Lake Baikal, a drive of just over one hour as soon as we had cleared the Friday afternoon rush. Apparently this excellent road was constructed in the late 1950’s in the expectation that President Eisenhower would visit Irkutsk and Lystvanka. The road was completed, but the U2 Spy Plane incident intervened and Eisenhower never made it. However the excellent bitumen road remains as his legacy.

Our accommodation is a room with shared facilities called “At Rita’s”, which is a modern wooden building, with considerable use of wood internally. Dinner is just up the road at “Olga’s”, a homestay. This means that we get some Russian home cooking, which turned out to be local fish, potatoes, tomatoes & mayonaisse and a cabbage salad. t was quite good and was accompanied by cups of hot tea (with milk, which we hadn't seen for a while).