Lee and Clare, The road home

Off to Baikal to our Izbar House...

12^th October 2003

Hello there, we've got a spare minute and need an excuse to get in out of the cold, so here's an e-mail about our plans for the next few days.

We had a few jobs to do yesterday to organise our next few days including sorting out getting to Lake Baikal and organising train tickets to Lee's homeland, Mongolia. We also visited a Decembrist House, the home of a dude who was part of the Decembrist Rebellion in 1812 (?) and was exiled to Siberia for hard labour. Interesting, especially since we had an English-speaking guide, always good as none of the museums here have any English information. We went to the regional museum here this morning and had fun making up our own stories about all the exhibits. Also had fun playing with the old typewriter and phone when the lady wasn't looking. She followed us around and turned off the lights as we went from one room into the next then sat in a chair and waited for us to move to the next room.

Today we are off to see Lake Baikal. We are getting a local bus (hopefully if we can work out how to get a ticket and find where it leaves from!) at 2.30. It takes two hours and is 70km. We have organised to stay in Listvyanka, a village by the lake. We are staying in a log cabin with an open fire. Have a look at this website - www.baikaler.com . There is a link there for accommodation. We think there are pictures of the cabin we'll be staying in on there. We'll be having walks by the lake when Lee isn't chopping wood for the fire.

Lee's been rechristened Peter (after the Rabbit, not the Great), and I can't stop singing Uma Uppity Uma Uma Uma, to him whenever he wears his hat.

We had our first experience of buying train tickets from an English-speaking lady yesterday. We are off to Mongolia on the 14th. Unfortunately we couldn't get a ticket for a day train so we could look at the lake as we went by - never mind. We leave about 8.30pm. This journey is 34 hours and we arrive in Ulaan Baator at 6.20am local time on the 16th of October. We have organised for a guy from one of the guest houses to come and meet us at the train platform which will be nice!! We've been looking at a lot of different tours and are thinking about a tour out to the Gobi Desert for four days and another one going out to stay with Mongolian nomads in a ger camp. The guy says we can hire warm clothes for free. It's minus 8-10 there at night at the moment. Should be fun!!

We probably won't e-mail again till we get to Mongolia, so in the meantime imagine us in our log cabin by the lake. By the way it's the biggest and deepest lake in the world and it contains almost one fifth of the world's fresh water and it has more water in it than the 5 great lakes of North America combined.

Must get out of here so we can get some lunch before going back to our home stay to get our bags. It's a flash apartment, especially for Russia, only problem is the TV was blaring till 2.30 in the morning and her and her friend were drinking vodka, not much sleep!

Lee and Clare