Look at the size of that noggin!

Irkutsk is the nearest big city to Lake Baikal, and as such has become a hub for travelers to the lake. The city is sited on the Angara River, another of those large, north-flowing rivers in the region, and the only one to drain Lake Baikal. On Friday night, I stayed in a hostel in the center of the city, where the Russian hostess was surprised to have a visitor who spoke the local language. I haven’t really done the hostel thing since I was in New Zealand about 10 years ago. I’ll say this: the worst thing about hostels is that I keep getting older and the kids staying there stay the same age.

The next morning I took the day train from Irkutsk to Ulan-Ude, which travels along the southern shore of Lake Baikal. Baikal is one of the natural wonders of the world and one of the most important sites in the Russian national consciousness. It holds 80 percent of Russia’s freshwater and twenty percent of the world’s supply. This is primarily a result of its depth; at roughly 5400 feet, it is by far the world’s deepest (you can read about the recent expedition to the bottom here). In comparison, it holds more water than all of the Great Lakes combined. The lake is also home to the one of two freshwater seal species on the planet, known as nerpa, which evolved after the lake was cut off from the sea. Moreover, Baikal was one of the first sites of importance for the nascent Soviet environmental movement, associated specifically with the construction of a cellulose processing plant lakeside in the 1960s (I wrote my junior paper during undergrad on this topic). After all that, I have to say I wasn’t very impressed. I’m willing to give it a second chance, however, given the overcast weather and the fact that I was traveling along the south shore, which is the most developed part of the lake, and looking out a rather dirty window. One program that I'm interested in is the Great Baikal Trail, which is working on developing eco-tourism in the region through the construction of a hiking trail that circles the lake.

On Saturday night, I arrived in Ulan-Ude, the capital of the Buryat Republic. It’s an attractive city, situated in the Selenga River valley (the river is one of the major inflows into Baikal, and unfortunately caries much of Mongolia’s untreated wastewater), and boasts the world’s largest Lenin head. The locals say that Lenin’s head has its own weather system (this is more than a joke; the head has not developed any guano reserves since it was installed in 1970 for Lenin’s 100th birthday).