Lake Baikal

If Irkutsk is “The Paris of Siberia” as locals claim, then Cleveland can be rightly called “The Paris of Ohio”. It’s not a bad town (especially by Siberian standards) and has a nice riverfront location, some ornate old wooden houses here and there and an especially beautiful church with medieval icon painting on its exterior. But mostly it’s your average developing world town with lots of old cars in various states of disrepair clattering along the roads, clusters of appealingly dingy storefronts and factories dominating most of the sidewalk views, and stray dogs running the streets at night like they own them.

I stepped off the train in Irkutsk two mornings ago but didn’t stay long. I was headed to Lake Baikal, a cavernous blue behemoth in Siberia’s center over 400 miles long and holding 20% of the planet’s fresh water, more than all of our five Great Lakes put together. Sitting as it does atop a continental divide, Baikal is deep as an ocean and will eventually become one as the tectonic plates continue their eternal shifting, colliding and stretching over millions of lifetimes. So deep that Vladimir Putin recently descended in a military deep-sea sub to see the vast harvest of crystallized natural gas deposits that lie at its bottom.

So first to the bus station to find a rickety local van to take me and a dozen cramped fellow passengers to Baikal’s shore four hours away, past larch forests burning bright yellow and long stretches of cattle country, where Buryat cowboys range the broad plain on horseback driving herds of steer from here to Tuva of throat-singing fame, finally arriving at a lakeshore steamboat that ferries us to Olkhon Island. During summers when tourist season is high, the line of cars to catch the ferry goes back for two kilometres, and tempers run hot; last summer a man was shot for cutting the car line and trying to force his way on.

By February this deepest lake on the planet will be so frozen over by the biting Siberian zima that they’ll be driving trucks over it. From December to January the island is cut off from the mainland, as ferries can’t navigate the jagged floes. I don’t want to be around for either; it’s already impressively brisk in September, and we’re all on deck freezing our asses off as we stare out drop-jawed at this imperial blue so clear that you can see forty meters and more down into it, and the glacier-peaked Matterhorn clones that ring it to the north for as far as the eye can see.

Olkhon itself is a craggy, forested island a little smaller than Manhattan with cliffs as high as Moher in places and lots of majestic rocky outcrops from which to stare down and across to the mainland and beyond. Western Ireland on one side facing Switzerland and its Alps on the other, with the world’s only freshwater seals living along both sides. It is massively beautiful on a scale one shouldn’t bother trying to describe with mere words. An Alaskan passenger says it reminds her of Kodiak. All I can say is I’ve never seen anything like it. It is inhuman in scale, more like a dwelling for Norse gods or a hyperbolic medieval Icelandic saga, and the few small settlements that exist here seem so inconsequential in comparison that they look as if they could be wiped off the map by one strong wind.

The village where I’m staying is typical Siberian, which is to say it’s little more than a Hollywood Western movie set. Sand roads meander through rows of clapboard wooden cottages, with Soviet-era vans puttering past from time to time and the occasional cow lazing about. The town grocer is a one-room affair with pretty basic foodstuffs and a wide selection of beers. The post office sells canned goods and packets of pasta, and boasts the one Internet access point on the island. It looks much like the Swedish island village featured in Ingmar Bergman films, perhaps even more austere if that’s possible, with stereotypical rural Russian types chopping wood or loading a crate of eggs into the back seat of their car.

I’m staying at Nikita’s Guest House, a set of cottages with attached cafeteria, bar and a banya that got a positive write-up in Lonely Planet and is now crammed with backpackers, mostly from Europe and Australia. And now that I’ve suddenly hooked into the scene I find they all stay at the same places at each stop. All thirty of us or so are booked at the same hostel in Ulaan Bataar a week hence. Nikita’s has become such a popular stop-off that new cottage construction is ongoing at the edge of town to handle the summer overflow, with talk of an official hotel and paved roads a few years hence. Ten years from now the place will likely be unrecognizable, with a Club Med, a McDonald’s and a row of tatty souvenir shops. But for now it’s still the same old little peasant village that it has been for centuries.

The food is hearty and good here, blinis with elderberry sauce and something that tastes suspiciously like grits for breakfast and fresh fish and potatoes for dinner, with strong Siberian tea and mulled wine at the café until midnight or so. The bathroom facilities leave much to be desired but are at least an authentic Siberian experience: flush-it-yourself with a bucket of water toilets and an outdoor banya (traditional Russian bath) that’s open at night where a crusty old man named Nikolai thwacks you with tree branches before you jump in a steam bath, then (if you’re especially masochistic, which I am not) you pop off and drop yourself in the freezing waters of Lake Baikal for the official end-to-end Russian bath experience.

Just outside town is Shaman Rock, a soaring stone outcrop that the Buryat treat as one of the four important spiritual poles on the planet. I’m unfamiliar with Buryat cosmology, but they signify its importance with a wooden pole that looks decidedly Native American (as do some Buryats) and is decorated with colorful patches of fabric, scarves and baseball caps that have been nailed or tied onto it.

At night the sky above Baikal is packed with an impossible freight of stars. Shockingly, they have wifi here, so I’m able to load Google Sky Map on my phone, point it up and discern the names of various stars after drinking in the café has wound down and we’re headed back to our cabins. Thanks to Patrick Schoonveld for getting me to upload that app, it’s especially cool when you can actually see the stars!

But then the phone battery winds down and we’re left to our own devices in the chill night air as we stare up at the cosmos – the northern lights blinking spectrally along one end – and several of us come up with names for our own constellations. For example, this one here is the last woolly mammoth that ever lived; to escape the Buryat hunters it kept trekking north with that spear in its side until it fell off the top of the Earth and was enshrined in the heavens. And that one there is a drunken Cossack from the time of Ivan the Terrible who was shot into the firmament by a cannonball that misfired while he was loading it. He chases the mammoth all night and never catches it. And do you see that one there, with a necklace of pearls? That is Admiral Kolchak’s wife, a noblewoman of Irkutsk; when her husband was beheaded by the Bolsheviks, she threw herself from Shaman Rock and was swallowed by the sky.