Lake Baikal

This morning we arrived in Irkutsk, the station for Lake Baikal. Having vaguely acclimatised to local time by going to be early last night (to be fair this cold has knocked me out so I spent the majority of yesterday asleep - luckily being on a train with no guilt about missing any of the local sights - anyway) we set the alarm for a civilised 9am for a 9:40am disembark (there is really very little preparation to do on a train in the morning) only to be woken with a jolt at 8am by the provodnitsa (our frightening carriage attendant lady) shouting "Irkutsk, Irkutsk" at the top of her lungs. Assuming we'd got our timings wrong somewhere along the line (entirely plausible when the timetable is on Moscow time, and well, in Russian, and the 5hr [we think] time difference, plus the start of summer time in the midst of it all) and leapt out of bed, hearts pounding, flew to the toilet to brush teeth and get dressed quicktime - waking up our grumpy cabin-mates in the process. Once dressed and pretty much packed it became apparent that we hadn't actually got our times wrong but for some reason the provodnitsa thought we needed nearly 2 hours to get ready. So we spent the next hour and a half sitting about and wishing we'd had the extra hour's sleep.

On arrival at Irkutsk we were met by our new honcho - Costa. We seem to be sharing him with another group also on our train doing the Ruski Huski trip so all in all he's in charge of about 20 people. Which is a bit rubbish but we're quite looking forward to leaving the masses behind a bit and doing our own thing so hopefully this will be an opportunity to do that. Costa does have his 'helper' with him who is his young, sullen-faced sister who either doesn't, or is too shy to, speak English - so not much of a helper.

We had to stop off for an hour or so in the city for some red tape ("give me your passports and visas and 300 rubles for registration") then headed for Lake Baikal and our hotel. It's like a ski chalet really with twin rooms - hooray!! Stifling hot as ever so we shut off all the heaters and opened the window as soon we got into the room but clean, spacious and not a dormitory!!

We had breakfast (at lunchtime) and showers - the first in 4 days - amazing!! - and then trotted off for our afternoon's activity of dog-sledding.

Mush-mush

Today we tried our hands at dog sledding!  It was just a little taster being dragged around the backgarden of a Russian dude.  Well actually the backgarden was a 5km loop through thin birch tree tracks and the dude was an international dogsled race champion whose goal was to win all the international trophies, and we were pulled by his champion dogs!  It's a very civilised way to travel, we were on the back of the sleds leaning into the bends to help it turn while 'the champ' was sitting in the front of the sled holding the dogs and issuing commands.  The huskies are incredibly intelligent look round for a call when coming to a branch in the path before receiving an instruction and turning in the appropriate direction.

Lake Baikal itself is also a phenomenon.  The worlds deepest lake at over 1 mile deep it also holds about 5% of all the worlds freshwater, more than all the great lakes put together!  Yes, that is an almost word for word transcription of what's in the lonely planet book but still good facts (feel free to use them at parties to amaze your friends).  Oh, one other seasonal feature..  It's completely frozen over.  So tomorrow we're going to go on a hike, literally, on lake Bikal.  We're stepping away from the main group for a bit of quiet time, taking a packed lunch and going for a nice long walk.  I can't wait to stretch my legs after 4 days of train.