Lake Baikal - Russia

This is were we spent two nights in a home stay on Lake Baikal in the village of Listvyanka. The Lake is 20% of the world's freshwater supplies. If all the rest of the world's drinking water ran out tomorrow, Lake Baikal could supply the entire population of the planet for the next 40 years! It is 1637 metres deep, 400 miles long, and between 20 and 40 miles wide (size of Britain). It claims to be the world's oldest lake, and freezes to a depth of 3 metres for 4 months of the year. It must be also one of the coldest! Legend has it that if you brave the icy waters for a swim and, if the shock doesn't kill you instantly, you'll add around 25 years to your life! Ian went in for - 20 seconds maybe, but did put his head under and managed a couple of strokes! The lake's remoteness kept it safe from environmental damage until the building of the Trans Siberain Railway and hence the towns. Over 80% of the species in the lake cannot be found anywhere else in the word! How about that! There are freshwater seals, and a fish that gives birth to its young alive and fully formed. The railway used to go from Irkutsk to the Lake, but now is only between small sections due to the water level having risen. Passengers prior to 1904, would cross the frozen lake from the Port on a steamer (90m ice-breaker), which also transported the train carriages on her deck. Interesting. We went to the small Museum to have a look at some of the displays of the unique marine life and animals. The three of us on our tour stayed in the same home stay for the two nights. A lovely Russian lady that spoke Dutch was our host, so Ian impressed her with his limited words of German. She didn't stay there, but come in and cooked our gigantic breakfasts of pancakes, toast, vegetables.....and so on. It was really homely and comfortable. We did a huge amount of walking around the beautiful lake with its mountains. It was 4 kms from the house to the market, where we tried the local Omul fish speciality. We walked to the 'Look Out' and managed 16 kms without knowing it on the second day, along, what we assumed was old unused railway tracks, but however wasn't. We hired a yacht with a crew, instead of a ferry to experience the lake, and got dropped off on another side, for our 8km 'track' walk. We had lovely food in a popular resturant having to put up with older vodka drinking women who liked to sing! Abit much! We ran into the other travellers that we had met on the train (small place and similar tour timetable) and enjoyed their compnay for both the nights. In their organised home stays they got fed breakfast, lunch and dinner and were struggling with the amount of food! I was grateful for just the breakfast. We treated ourselves to a Sauna and freezing plunge pool. It was so hot that we struggled to stay in for 10 minutes at a time. If you can imagine the three of us bending down as low as we could were the air wasn't as muggy, watching the stop watch and hanging out for the 10 minutes we had given ourselves as a goal. Experiencing Lake Baikal is certainly highly recommended. Next....The train to Mongolia.....