This isn't a road, it's a direction

On Thursday, I took the bus to Barguzin, north of Ulan-Ude about 200 miles. While waiting for the bus to leave, I made friends (over beers at 9am, of course) with Sasha, a Russian who has been working in the ‘service’ for about 10 years and has three more years to go until he starts getting a pension. This surprised me, though the intricacies of the Russian pension system are beyond my comprehension; I just know that everyone wants one so they don’t have to work (another person I talked to told me that in the north, women can start receiving their pensions at 50). The bus ride was hot and rather unpleasant, given that for 150 of those 200 miles the road was being repaved (the other 50 miles, except for a short stretch near Lake Baikal, were not much better) and Sasha kept insisting that we have more beer. Russians are quite hard to convince that, no, I actually don’t want a third beer before lunch.

There were a couple of scenic highlights to the bus, however. The first was the lunch stop on the shore of Lake Baikal. I stuck my hand in the water and took out the camera to snap a photograph marking this momentous occasion (Lake Baikal is, after all, a World Heritage Site). It was then that I realized I’d left my battery back in Ulan-Ude. This was rather tragic; you’ll have to rely on my descriptions (or photos from the internet). The Lake, where we stopped, was wide (50 miles?) and the peaks on the western side were visible. The second highlight was the Svyatiy Nos (The Holy Nose) peninsula, visible from the lakeside town of Ust-Barguzin. It rises straight up, stretching like a wall to the north; the top of the peninsula is more than a mile about the Lake. I didn’t make the climb, but I imagine it’s quite impressive.

After taking the ferry across the Barguzin River, which consisted of a barge, pushed and pulled by a smoke-belching tug boat, we covered the last 40 miles or so to Barguzin in about an hour. Here Sasha proved his worth by helping me track down the town’s only functioning hotel. Barguzin is a fascinating place. It’s been inhabited since the mid-17th century, not long after Russians first explored Baikal’s eastern shore. It was also a popular place for external exile, with Jews and Poles both ‘resettled’ to the village. There were a number of tombstones in the old cemetery with Hebrew inscriptions. Also exiled here were some of the Decembrists, a group of military officers who protested the accession of Czar Nicholas I to power in 1825 by leading a 3000-soldier strong revolt. The most famous of this group to be sent to Barguzin was Mikhail Kuhel’beker. In true Soviet fashion (anti-Czarist, anti-Empire), there’s a monument to Kukel;beker and his brother, Wilhelm, sited prominently by the river. Despite all this exciting history, the real highlight of being in Barguzin was the friendliness of the people and the beauty of the surroundings: the wide river valley edged by two mountain ranges viewed in the late-evening northern light. (Sorry about the battery!)