Listviyanka on Lake Baikal

After a few days in Irkutsk we got the bus to a small Siberian village next to Lake Baikal which is a huge fresh water lake in the middle of Siberia. It's so big it looks like a sea and is frozen a foot thick throughout winter. The views around here are amazing with bright white glistening ice that turn into a skyline of snowy mountain peaks in the distance. Listviyanka is a lovely place to get out of Russian cities and breath the freezing cold but clean country air. It's a really atmospheric place and if you go out at night you can hear nothing but the wolf-like howling of Listviyanka's hundreds of big dogs and smell nothing but the wood smoke from the cottage chimneys.

When we arrived it was bright sunshine and the views, which can be obscured by mist, were very clear. We wandered around town looking for somewhere to stay until a friendly man showed us a cottage he had for rent. It was a gorgeous, ramshackle traditional wooden siberian cottage with 3 bedrooms and, crucially for Karen 'Pyrofeatures' Higgins, a wood burning stove in the lounge area with an unlimited supply of wood. We stayed for two nights during which time Karen would test the definition of the phrase 'unlimited wood' to its limits. By the second night Karen had made the cottage so hot that I had to go out into -20 degree temperatures to keep cool. Karen considers this her finest achievement to date.

We had a very nice couple of days here relaxing, reading and playing chess in front of the fire at night and walking along the main street in the village with me obssessively taking photographs during the day. We walked on the lake a bit but were quite tentative about this due to a few wooden crosses on the lake which seemed to suggest some people had died before the ice had got thick enough to walk on.

We had heard that you could go huskie sledging in Listviyanka so we walked around trying to find out about this. We walked a couple of miles out of town in the cold and eventually found the place. Unfortunately we didn't have enough Roubles and they didn't accept U.S. Dollars or Visa. They helpfully told us that their was a cash machine back in the centre of the village two miles away. We dutifully trudged back into town to find that the entire village was without electricity which made withdrawing money a bit difficult. At this point we decided that dog sledging was not to be and got the bus back to Irkutsk. A couple in the hostel in Irkutsk later, annoyingly(!), told us that this was highlight of their Russina trip.

Photos for Listviyanka and Lake Baikal can be found here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ianwhitfield/sets/72157603797379769/