Day 18 - 27th July 2009 Monday

Churchill said it well when he described Russia as ‘a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma’. I always expected to see the country behind the curtain as a sad and grey world of long queues for food and a sense of desperation borne out of long years of hardship. Perhaps that is still prevalent in the outlying areas well away from Moscow. After all, it took me the best part of a week to barely scratch the surface of a country that covers two continents. The biggest single country in the world. Big statistics, big place, big impressions. It definitely made a big impression on me. Average monthly wages range from €150 in the far reaches from the empirical heart of the capital, and rise exponentially as you approach the political centre to somewhere in the region of €800 or more per month. As I sat there in Red Square on a beautiful sunny day fanned gently by a light cooling summer breeze I watched hordes of tourists descend on these images so well known from postcards, television and movies over the years.Pokrovsky cathedral was an architectural wonder to behold and being set at the end of Red Square acted either as the opening act or finale to what must be one of the great spectacles of the modern world, depending on which way you enter the square. Buildings so grand in style and so large as not to be able to take everything in at one or even two glances. Perhaps Russia, and more particularly Moscow, was essentially at one time a closed world to the west but as I listened to the languages and accents around me, I could see it had opened up into a cosmopolitan and welcoming space. How tolerant that would be were you to exercise your democratic rights as you would expect them to be upheld in other western countries I don’t know. I certainly didn’t intend to find out either. The day was Monday and, like Mao, Lenin was out visiting his relatives that day, so I left a note to say I hoped to get a chance to call in and say hello the following day.The numerous buildings around seemed to be brocaded in gold. I wondered how they stopped it all from tarnishing? The colours transfixed the gaze, all helped of course by the bright sunshine.Perhaps it wasn’t quite so breathtaking in the depths of winter. That night we had tickets for the last night of the season’s Bolshoi Ballet. At €125 a ticket it was expensive, but surely one of the must-sees of Moscow? We rushed back to get showered, get much wrinkled clothes as unwrinkled as possible, and headed out on the town.The Bolshoi was everything I expected it to be and being the last night, there was a full house. The old ladies in the balconies used their theatre glasses to look, not at the dancers, but at the audience. To see and be seen was as important at this cultural gathering as the dancing. No late night at the after show party for me, as the following day I had an important appointment to keep with Lenin.

Day 17 - 26th July 2009 Sunday

The last day on a train for a while, thank God. A 5.30am start due to all the time changes ensured a fuzzy head. The last time change to Moscow time was finally around the corner - literally. The sun shone for the first time in a few days and we had breakfast in the restaurant car as a treat. There was less than 1000km left to go!!
The entrepreneurial kitchen assistant kept coming round the compartments selling fried doughnuts. I looked at her and said ‘Meat?’ She nodded and said ‘Meat’. It was, just.
It was very quiet on the train now with most people having left the train during the evening or night before at the large cities en route to Moscow. Plug girl and friends made themselves pretty in advance of arrival. Anticipation grew as we entered the outskirts of the city at last. Graffiti is graffiti the world over. Finally, after passing through industrial areas, the train slowly pulled into Moscow and a fanfare of music announced our triumphant arrival.
We were met on the platform by a guide who gave us all the information we needed to travel onwards to St. Petersburg after our time in Moscow was complete. He walked at about one hundred miles an hour and spoke at the same speed. I had trouble keeping up while carrying all my bags. Outside, we ran the usual gamut of hoards of poor people hanging around the entrance to the station, then as soon as he had shown us the entrance to the Metro he disappeared like magic! He gave us everything we needed but did so in about 3 minutes flat. We were left feeling bewildered as to what to do next, but eventually talked over what he had said and managed to pick out the information we needed to find our hotel.
We took the Metro to our hotel in the Arbatskaya area, a suburb of the city that had become renowned as being the cultural capital of the city. As we staggered from the Metro, the first impression of Moscow was a forward thinking, bright and colourful city with fantastic buildings and crazy traffic constantly travelling at breakneck speeds. Asking directions we were advised to use the pedestrian underpasses below the roads at all times, because the traffic was so heavy. The hotel turned out to be in the embassy quarter and was thus full of private clubs and call girls touting for business, but still pleasant and unthreatening. Harry Potter was on in the cinema, as it had been in every city en route, in every language. The magic of advertising. There were churches galore with golden towers shining, reflecting the sun and singing out their message of freedom of faith in the new regime.
After an expensive meal at the Hard Rock Café, the first western style food in a long time, we went back to the hotel to give our clothes a well deserved hand wash. I woke up during the night thinking I was back in China. The room looked like a Chinese laundry with all the wet clothes lying on every available surface. Moscow had called to us, and we had finally arrived. Red Square and Vladimir Ilyitch Lenin waited for us patiently…

Day 16 - 25th July 2009 Saturday

PLUG WARS

Woke up to day three on the train at 6am. We had already passed through two time zones yesterday and upon waking today just passed through another one. My body clock was totally out of sync and my digestive system was reacting badly. The fact that I was in Russia I suppose I could have said that it’s revolting but that would have been stating the obvious! The time had changed to Moscow time minus one and I got up for a quick wash in the train toilet. The was a rudimentary sink in the toilet and a hole in the floor for spilt water. Kind of like a wet room. I used the top of my aftershave bottle as a plug to hold the water in the sink. Plugs are a rare commodity in Russia apparently. Holding on while the train rode a curve I tried to get as good a wash as possible in the cramped conditions. Three days non stop on a train get to you after a while. The scenery outside changes, although I had to admit that this last two days all I had seen was green fields, trees and rivers. Very nice but it looks just like a never ending Irish landscape. Inside the train though you try to read, write sleep and eat. Not much else to do except go to the restaurant Car and drink. Food wise you can bring your own food with you - much cheaper. Or if you don’t have your own and don’t want to eat on the train you can wait until one of the 10-15 minute stops at a little station somewhere and buy supplies from the babushkas on the platform. I have seen everything from doughnuts to crayfish for sale. I asked what was in the doughnuts and the babushka said ‘Meat’. What sort of meat? I asked. ‘Meat’ she said. Hmm. So I had some and, sure enough, it was meat. Not sure what type of meat it was but it was definitely meat.
At 12 midday we left Siberia. At 5pm we crossed the border between Asia and Europe at last. Another white obelisk marked the invisible line between the east and west. There was always a saying when boating that every day a yacht would shrink by a foot in length the longer you spent aboard. By the end of a week or so you were so glad to get away from your crewmates and back on dry land. I can vouch that a train suffers from the same reduction fever and you really need to be very good friends with your travelling companions before you begin such an undertaking.
A girl three compartments down had a habit of hogging the only working electric socket in our carriage for her mobile phone. Our Chinese guide and fellow traveller needed to charge her laptop and did so when the plug was available. Within half an hour ‘Plug Girl’ had unplugged it without warning as she needed to say lovey-dovey things to her anticipatory boyfriend waiting with baited breath in Moscow. When she arrived she looked like she had just stepped off a Milan catwalk. If her beau had seen her for the last three days with unkempt hair, no make up and wrinkled vest and hot pants and/or pyjama bottoms he would maybe have thought twice about arriving with a bunch of flowers that probably cost him half his month’s wages. Anyway, plugs went in, came out, went in and out again. No words were said but there was a slow kind of east/west attrition only warmed up by the hair dryer and curling tongs in use when the plug had been, yet again, reclaimed by the east. I told our companion that maybe she should politely ask the girl if she was finished with the socket for a while thus thawing international relations, but her point was that she didn’t know the words in Russian. I looked up the phrasebook and a little devil whispered to me…..
I showed her the Russian phonetic translation for what she thought was ‘Are you finished yet?’ which she practiced a few times before heading up the corridor. When she said it to plug girl I was later told that she looked confused at first, then had a dawning look of understanding in her eyes and finally looked quite horrified. She said ‘Nyet!’, unplugged her hairdryer and backed into her compartment while closing the door sharply. Our companion, confused, relayed the experience to me. I had to explain that I had told her, quite accidentally of course, that she had actually said something like ‘Are you married?’ Or ‘Are you free?’ or some such statement. Either way it solved the war of the plug quite succinctly I thought. It also helped pass the time rather well.

Day 15 - 24th July 2009 Friday

Train stops, train starts. I wake up, look out, fall asleep. This happened a number of times during each of the nights as we made little calls to out of the way non-descript places. The guidebooks would give the names of expected stops along the route but these places didn’t even merit more than a mention of expected stopping time and subsequent journey time until the next stop. By the morning, well 6am or so, it was pointless to try to sleep any longer. I would watch the telegraph wires pass by like continuous lines drawn by black indelible marker pens across the sky, broken only by the brief flash of a supporting pole each 25 metres apart. I could tell they were at 25 metre intervals as there were always kilometre markers along the left hand side of the tracks. These would count down towards Moscow in tenths of a kilometre. Then at every two kilometres you would get the distance left to travel - 2000, 1998, 1996 and so on. How often I watched those markers count ever slower. It was always a great feeling to wake up after a few hours sleep and see that you had covered up to 400 kilometres during the night. The main excitement came from watching the numbers go from four figures down to three, from 1000 to 998. This was punctuated by time zone changes, upset stomachs and sleep patterns. Oh, what fun we had. We waited with baited breath to see the obelisk that marked the halfway point between Moscow and Beijing. The excitement built as the moment came closer and we expected to see a grandiose pillar of biblical proportions. It was so small we almost missed it. After that we settled back into our routines as best as possible until the next excitement, which in this case was the male Provodnitsas doing the vacuum cleaning around our feet. Like I said, small things become big things when there is little to do. The enterprising lady in the kitchen knew we were a captive audience and came round regularly with hot fried things - not sure exactly what they were, just things - a great way to boost the coffers. During a stop at Malinsk we bought fried doughnuts on the platform. Everything was fried. They were washed down with copious amounts of vodka which helped dull the excitement. The landscape of Russian steppes was continuous and more or less monotonous, not because it wasn’t pretty but because it went on forever. Day in, day out, the view was only punctuated by white, blue and yellow flowers interspersed between the birch trees and the small towns and villages where no-one ever stopped. Alexei, our travelling companion, made it safely to Novosibirsk and I wished him the best of luck with his English tests and with his new life ahead in space age Ireland. I would love to say that Alexei regaled us with his wit and innate charm. I really would, but sadly that was not to be.

Day 14 - 23rd July 2009

Yet another early wake up. For some reason, I couldn’t seem to catch up with my sleep. The patterns were so erratic partly due to all the travels but also due to the time zone changes. The next three days would see six different time zones in total. How I would have loved a lie in! After a lovely breakfast prepared by Alex I did the shopping for the trip as the restaurant cars on Russian trains were privately run since the end of communism, and unfortunately you couldn’t guarantee the quality of the food from train to train. In actual fact, the menu tended to be written each day depending on what the staff were able to buy from the babushkas, or grandmothers, at each station. Even so, there was always the staples of cabbage and tongue, so we wouldn’t starve.
Our diet tended to consist of dried noodles a lot, but this time I tried to supplement this healthy mix by getting fresh roast chicken, cheese, tomatoes, lettuce, pickles and bread. One final and most important thing was a bottle of Chinggis Khaan 42 percent vodka. I can’t stand the stuff but all indications showed we would have to get some to fit in. Besides, with all our gear we couldn’t physically carry enough cans of beer to last three people for three days with nothing else to do. Of course, alcohol was sold in the restaurant car, or PECTOPAH, as it read when spelt in Cyrillic, but at exorbitant prices. Actually, it was only recently that strong alcohol was allowed to be consumed on trains at all in Russia. Thankfully, over the 72 hours that we travelled on the train, no one challenged us to a straight vodka toasting party as we had been expecting so we cut it with pure orange juice to make it more palatable. That said, if I never see vodka again it’ll be too soon.
Getting on the train at 4pm in Irkutsk we said goodbye to Dmitri, a most helpful guide and genuine easy going character. Normally the attendants, or provodnitsas, were women who rules the carriage with fists of iron, making sure everything was kept shipshape and Moscow fashion, and keeping a constant eye on the samovar - the wood burning water boiler always at the ready, day and night, at the end of every carriage. But this time, for such a long run, there were two provodnitsas, both men! In these days of equality, why not? Although they did look a bit funny wearing ladies housecoats when doing the vacuuming.
We found our carriage and also our travelling companion for the next 36 hours. Alexei, I quickly recognised, was a shy bookish type as soon as I had introduced myself to him. Amiable, but quiet, I managed to get some information about his journey with us. It turned out that he was an astrophysicist and was attached to the university at Irkutsk. He had to go a city called Novosibirsk for English tests to prove his English was up to scratch prior to a posting he had been offered in the UK. His English was better than a lot of ex-pats living in Spain, which isn’t necessarily surprising. I asked him whereabouts he was hoping to work in the UK and was pleasantly surprised when he said the Armagh Observatory in Northern Ireland. Less than 50 miles from where I lived! Talk about a small world? Here I was in central Asia, on a train, only to meet a local who wanted to live in my small country. When asked about my vocation I explained I was an artist and gathering experiences to create an exhibition in the future. Sadly, we realised that he had no interest or understanding of art just as I knew virtually nothing of astrophysics. Our conversation on each other’s subjects dried up pretty fast. I tried to keep a sort of dialogue up but it was hard work. It wasn’t until much later that I realised he was happy to talk when we were alone. As soon as either of the two ladies in my party turned up he clammed up tightly. I think perhaps, even though he was obviously a highly intelligent man, he was an extremely inward person and maybe a bit shy of women.
I had read that food was always expected to be shared with your fellow passengers and would be reciprocated. All except the smugglers over the Russian/Mongolian border of course. I offered Alexei bits and pieces of our purchases which he accepted graciously, but he never once offered anything back. Perhaps his money was a lot tighter, but if he had shown a little more generosity I would have returned it tenfold happily. I asked him why he was going to Novosibirsk by train and he said it was the cheapest way. Car was not an option because of the vast distances involved, and although there was a two hour flight available it was just way too expensive for him to contemplate. So he had to persevere on a train for 36 hours with three wrinkled smelly travellers drinking vodka and pure orange and eating noodles messily with chopsticks. I hope it doesn’t put him off his Chinese food in Ireland.
When destined to spend a long period on a train such as this you try to make things last as long as possible just to avoid the boredom. We spent at least one hour to make up our beds, going to the toilet to brush our teeth (still couldn’t work the tap at this stage) and getting ready for sleep. I spent the time getting caught up with some notes of my experiences of the day and we settled down as best as was possible for the night. We all slept with our heads towards the window, Alexei turned the opposite way. The train’s rocking and rolling helped lull me to sleep and I dreamt about painting pulsars and quasars floating round the head of Einstein. I wonder what Alexei dreamt of?

Day 13 - 22nd July 2009

4.30am. Wide awake. Not because I wanted to be but because the four bed dorm we were in had a big glass window with no shutters or curtains. Coupled with the fact that my head was right below the window ensured I got my full early morning fix of vitamin D. The heavy rain clouds had passed on and the sun was trying in vain to burn the mist off the lake. Considering that Baikal never gets much above 15 degrees in the height of summer, being so deep and frozen for most of the year, it was hardly surprising that such a process tended to take much of the day. We got up and walked across the garden to the outhouse among the trees where a wooden shower house had been erected. Everything was wooden around this village. There were a lot of trees. At least there was hot water.
After a simple breakfast we kept the appointment we made the previous night to meet the former inhabitants of the village. The mosquitoes had calmed down enough for us to enter the hallowed ground. Each grave had a plain wooden or painted metal fence around. Some painted black, but the majority were painted bright blue. This colour seemed to be very prevalent as we had seen it at every train station on the journey. As you left the stations you always noticed that nearly all the houses had the same colour scheme, a certain shade of light blue. When I was growing up in Belfast there was an old joke that many shipyard worker’s houses were painted red inside and out from the ‘acquisitions’ of red lead paint used to prevent the hulls of great ships from rusting during the building process. You were safe as long as you didn’t lick the walls! Perhaps the same went for the former communist workers in Russia. Corporate railway colours became this year’s new black. ‘You can have any colour scheme in the house you like dear, as long as it’s railway blue’.
Looking among the gravestones we could see photographs of those reposing below. It was always better to see an old face than a young one. You knew the person had lived a long and hopefully happy life. The younger, fresher faces had had their time cut short. I wondered what had caused their demise, illness perhaps or an accident? Given my ignorance of the Cyrillic alphabet I couldn’t decipher the details, save for the years of birth and death. One grave caught my eye in particular. The grave of a Russian soldier, and his picture complete with fur hat and metal star over the furry peak. Like all graves in the cemetery, his was facing east, so the dead can see the sunrise every day. I couldn’t read his name as it had been obliterated by time and the elements but he appeared no more than in his late 30’s or early 40’s. I wondered had he died in a soviet conflict somewhere. Imagine leaving the tiny village of Bolshiye Koty to fight and lose your life in some foreign land, only to return in a box. Perhaps he was stationed in the area during conflict years and died on duty. Maybe Bolshiye Koty wasn’t his native ground? We will never know, but as these thoughts crossed my mind I could hear a certain Billy Joel tune run through my head. ‘Leningrad’ was about a Russian soldier who became a circus clown after his military service and spent his remaining days making people laugh. A poignant song that makes a valid point. We really are all the same under the skin regardless of where we come from. I have come to realise this more and more as I journey across continents.
Leaving the dead in peace to enjoy the last of the sunrise, we returned to the small dock. There is a myth that states if you put your hand into Baikal you will live 5 years longer, two hands 10 years, both hands and a foot 15 years and so on. If you immerse yourself bodily you are supposed to live forever, but knowing how cold the water was I think all you would do is shorten your life considerably from shock.

We risked our hands and feet, so hopefully will be around for a few years yet. The boat was already there and we waited for the same high heeled stewardess to untie the heavy lines with her miraculously unchipped nails. A ten minute run in the hydrofoil and we arrived in Lystvyanka, the slightly bigger little village we had seen the day before. Our guide from Irkutsk, Dmitri, arrived to meet us and gave a quick tour of the village. We stopped at a viewpoint overlooking the lake. Beside us was a tree with thousands of coloured ribbons tied to it like psychedelic leaves. Dmitri explained that although during the soviet years religion was all but forbidden, people still held onto faith and tied tokens of hope to this tree. Onwards to a little market filled with wooden stalls, and the smell of fish being smoked filled the air. A heady mix of what seemed like cigars and salmon assailed our nostrils and tantalised our taste buds. A distant cousin to the salmon, the Omul, is found in Lake Baikal. It’s the only source of this fish in the world and when smoked is considered a real delicacy. Hot smoked as opposed to cold, we bought it while still warm and moist. Delicious! It reminded me of my father returning after a successful day’s fly fishing, and hot smoking his own salmon in a converted biscuit tin with holes punched into it to let the smoke filter out past the recumbent fish.
We had lunch at a lakeside restaurant and asked Dmitri to join us as our guest. When he saw the prices he was horrified, said it was more than he earned in a day and graciously withdrew. The prices were more or less equivalent to a McDonald’s takeaway. After lunch we were asked did we want to see the so called trained dancing bears. If so, Dmitri said we would have to pay extra as it was outside his budget. We declined the offer, not because of the extra fee, but because we could see the small cages they were kept in when not ‘performing‘. I have seen reports on television in years past how some poor creatures were trained to dance. One version was to place the animal on a large flat metal plate. Chain it so it couldn’t escape, and light a gas ring under the plate. Every time they would play music they lit the gas and the poor creature would have to move from foot to foot to avoid the pain of the heat. When the music stopped so did the heat. After a while the creature became so mentally disturbed it would start to dance instantly in fear of being burnt. Pavlov’s dogs taken to extremes. Barbaric. I shuddered to think how these poor bears had been conditioned. We left Lystvyanka thinking it over in silence. Halfway back to Irkutsk we stopped at a reconstructed wooden village museum showing what life was like over the centuries for Russian people, gentry and peasants alike. From fortresses, churches, schoolhouses and private dwellings, we saw how the styles changed. The modern dacha, or country houses, we saw every day by the railway tracks hadn’t actually changed that much in the intervening years. Each of the houses in the museum had decorations that were meant to ward off evil spirits. Doorways were very small and low, not just as a heat saving device in the frozen winters, but also to force the visitor to bow down in deference to the owner as they crossed the threshold. Beds were four poster affairs but the mattress was up high to retain as much heat as possible. The children had a similar type of high bed which they shared. Each child had one plank to sleep on, so you could work out the number of children in a family by counting the planks in the bed.
We stopped by an old church where Dmitri explained something to me that I had always wondered about. Why did the Russian Orthodox Church have two extra bars on their crucifixes, and why was the bottom one always set at an angle. The explanation was that the upper small wooden bar across was to signify the name of Jesus as it is sometimes depicted - INRI - and the angled one at the bottom was meant to represent a foot rest coming outwards, like a two dimensional representation of a three dimensional object, upon which rested the feet of Jesus when he was nailed to the cross.
As we left the church a wedding party turned up. I asked Dmitri how to say good luck in Russian and passed on my best wishes to the happy couple. I forget the words now but they replied with a ‘spaceba’ or ‘thank you’ and smiles. Dmitri explained that the best man and bridesmaid also had another job to do after their expected duties on the wedding day. That of marriage guidance counsellors. If there were any problems in the marriage they were meant to help sort it out and keep the marriage together at all costs. Not a bad thing maybe. Perhaps our western societies might benefit from this approach. If the best man and bridesmaid knew they would have their work cut out for them in future years because of a couple’s incompatibility perhaps they might have tried to talk the couple out of getting married in the first place.

On the main road back to Irkutsk we were told the road was known locally as the ‘Eisenhower Road’. Apparently, well after the war, Eisenhower intimated that he was thinking about visiting the area. The then leader of Russia, President Khrushchev wanted to create an impression of great wealth and power. He ordered that the road between Irkutsk and Lake Baikal be upgraded from a rough track to a high class two lane road. Almost 70km of asphalt road was constructed in only two months at horrendous expense. Eisenhower never came.
Finally, at around 6pm we returned to Alex’s flat overlooking Lenin Street. A quick shower and we caught the last of a service in a beautiful orthodox church nearby. The harmonised voices of one man and two women reverberated around the curved and painted walls of the small church. It was a very moving experience. We stopped on the way back at an Italian restaurant for a pizza. A bottle of red wine was ordered. The first in a very long time. Sadly, a lot of Russian wine is sweet and this was no exception. Hard to get down, but as it was so expensive compared to Spain, drink it we did. The pizza was every bit as strange. The base was made from puff pastry instead of the usual dough. Different but tasty enough. Another reasonably early night was called for. The next day was the start of the big push to Moscow and we needed to get as much rest as possible.

Day 12 - 21st July 2009

Another early start. Picked up by private minibus at 7.45am for the next leg of our epic adventure. We were driven out of the pretty streets in the centre of the city and taken to the hydrofoil terminal on the outskirts. By doing so we saw a lot more of the sort of buildings we had expected. Grey concrete, run down tenement style housing with old soviet propaganda symbols. Hammers and sickles abound, with the odd poster style image of triumphal workers created in mosaics coupled with slogans that I can only guess suggested how wonderful the old regime had been. That said, the place was clean and people were well dressed. Better it has to be said than some ex-pats around Spain. The silent Siberian driver sported long dreadlocks and had the coldest ice blue eyes I have ever seen. We were shown down into the hydrofoil.

The stewardess, resplendent in airline style uniform, stockings and black patent high heels told us our seat numbers. Once seated I could see the deck through my window. The seats were placed low down in the boat so the window was at shoulder height for those below. The high heeled, glamorous stewardess was visible up to ankle level and I could see her carefully untying the lines to release the boat from the dock. Perhaps she didn’t want to ladder her stockings or chip her nails. It was a curious sight from my viewpoint. A big heavy rope being coiled beside a dainty pair of feet encompassed in high heels.
Once free of the dock we quickly got up onto the plane and raced downriver and out into Lake Baikal. A vast stretch of water that is so large you can barely make out the far shore. As it is, the shoreline is out of sight at normal head height because of the curve of the earth, and that is at the narrowest point. Baikal, 40km wide by 500km long, is the largest freshwater lake in the world and totally drinkable straight from the lake thanks to filtering sponges living deep down in the depths. There are species of flora and fauna here that are not found anywhere else in the world. In a few billion years, scientists have theorised that Baikal will become the world’s next ocean by splitting Asia apart. Tectonic plate separation is increasing the area of the lake by a few millimetres each year.
After a brief stop to de-bus passengers at the little touristy town of Lystvyanka we continued about 15km north to the tiny village of Bolshiye Koty. A quaint genuine wooden village with approximately 40 permanent inhabitants. This would swell up to perhaps 500 in the summer as people would use it as a platform to go hiking or camping in the vast forests and hills surrounding the lake. We were met by a young female guide, whose name I have sadly forgotten, and walked the 3 minutes through the village’s dirt track street and along the lakeside to our private home accommodation. A rustic wooden log affair that had originally been a small house. The owners had simply built another house over and around the original to house travellers like us. It would also provide much needed insulation for winter. We were taken to our four bed dorms over the main house and had a wonderful rustic balcony with views over a misty Baikal. Basic but adequate. It’s hard to believe that, come winter the lake freezes up to 3 metres deep. Thick enough to drive a car across in some places. Each house had hoses stretched across the road down to the lake for their fresh drinking water. What do they do in winter, I asked? They simply cut a hole in the ice and drop the hose deeper down to access their winter water supply. Being in the heart of Siberia, temperatures can drop to minus 50 in extreme cases, and surprisingly in summer have been known to hit the high 40’s.


There was absolutely nothing to do in Koty, except eat and drink, walk around the village taking atmospheric photographs of yesteryear and for me, catch up on some writing. Over a delicious lunch of home made blinis we saw a device sitting on top of the old rusty cooker in the kitchen. It had a dial on it that flickered back and forth and was connected to a car battery sitting on the ground. Considering the basic conditions in which we were living we convinced ourselves the cooker was operated by the car battery and the device on top registered the charge being used. A very Heath Robinson affair. Then it occurred to me that the little box with the dial was only a battery charger and was actually charging the battery. They had mains electric. The charger was simply sitting on top of the cooker. It’s strange how the mind works when you are in an unfamiliar environment. When another of our party arrived and asked the same question about the battery operated cooker, I explained that it was actually a seismological device to warn of impending earthquakes. Given the fact that Baikal is on a fault line people had to monitor the constant fluctuations of the earth’s plates in the region. I pointed out the flickering needle on the dial and said there were hundreds of little tremors each minute and managed to keep this little ruse going for at least 10 minutes before bursting out laughing and giving the game away. Such fun when you have nothing else to do.
We sat on the rough hewn balcony on creaky old chairs and relaxed. I caught up on some more writing and we watched as big heavy threatening clouds rolled down the lake. As they hit the surrounding hills they groaned loudly and threw shards of lightning in our direction. The sonic booms of thunder reverberated around the valleys and took our collective breaths away. Tonnes of fresh water poured down above our heads and obliterated the lake. This was summer in Siberia.
There was only one shop in the village. A room had been converted into a rudimentary store in one of the wooden shacks and the only access to the goods was via the owner through a small hatch in the window. Unfortunately it always seemed to be closed. There was a sign in the hatch that informed potential customers of something, but as it was in Cyrillic we couldn’t understand.
Walking to the far side of the village, in a forest we found the graveyard but there were too many mosquitoes under the trees to get closer. We vowed to return and visit the dead centre of the village next morning before leaving. We had long since exhausted the entertainment guide the village had to offer. I would love to say I got bolshie in Koty but there was no-one to get bolshie with. It was an early night, but not voluntarily.