Irktusk

I love trains. The train was long and wonderful. They rock me to sleep and give me an excuse to wear pjs and read books and drink tea. It was a 36 hour trip, but probably 10 hours of it was spent on the border dealing with visas and luggage checks and passports and everything. I was holding my breath the whole time but got through fine. I am in Irktusk now, arrived at 7am this morning after a late evening of Sudoku with Serg, a Mongolian businessman that I shared a compartment with. He spoke minimal English but after a 750mL bottle of vodka he was doing pretty well. But he was nice and not sketchy at all.


Serg and Sudoku

Russia is cold. They told me in UB that it was colder there than Russia but I disagree.

I am staying at a cool hostel. Two Austrian guys are the only foreign folks I have seen and we are staying at the same place and headed to Olkhon Island tomorrow. It is about halfway up Lake Baikal. Lake Baikal is the deepest lake in the world apparently and contains 20% of all the fresh water in the world. It is supposed to be stunning. Look at a map. There is apparently a great hostel there run by some Russian ping pong champion... We will see.

Irktusk is nice. Small town and completely walkable. Pretty uneventful so far and people have been really nice. It is pretty hard to get things done because nothing is written in English and no one speaks English. I am planning on Russian Roulette (pun intended) with my menus when I choose food and going to the supermarket for most of my food. It is also damn pricey everywhere so I may be eating bread and jam for awhile.

Not sure what is after that... I have about 3 weeks to kill here and I want to stop in some smaller towns before going to Moscow.

Hopefully I can get some pictures uploaded soon.

Take care.