The Wild Wild East...
Irkutsk is, as one of my former editors put it, The Paris of Siberia... It's an oddly accurate description really. Despite the fact that the city itself has almost nothing to offer even the most dedicated and adventurous tourist, it is, in it's own strange and unqiue way, quite an interesting town... I've spent nearly a week here, based out of either Irkutsk itself, or, for three nights, Olkhon Island, which is 350 hundred kilometers north of here and takes somewhere between 6 and 8 hours to reach by bus, depending on how adept the driver is at dodging potholes and cows, both of which can be found in great abundance on the dirt roads of Siberia... The bus trip north was, for the most part, uneventful, though I did manage to make myself a new friend on the way. Karolina, a Polish girl who's travelling exploits make mine, to date, look quite meager, was sitting behind me on the bus. She was the only other English-speaker on the bus at the start of the trip (Not counting a pair of Quebecois who made it fairly clear they were "from Quebec, not Canada" and didn't like Canadian anglophones) and we managed to become decent friends over the course of the trip. Being a linguistics student, Karolina's Russian skills are, to say the least, far superior to my own; we spent the better part of two days bumming around on beaches and hiking the island before she had to return to Irkutsk to catch a train to Mongolia. We're planning on meeting up and getting a group together for some tours in Ulan-Bator once I get there...
Olkhon Island was fascinating in it's own way. Most of my time was spent in the village of Khuzir, located about halfway up the western side of the island. The town is at once extremely primitive and quite advanced (by Siberian standards); electricity was only brought in in 2005, and running water is still, if you'll pardon the pun, a pipe-dream. The room I stayed in was a small three-bedroom (though I had the place to myself) on the very edge of town. A quick step out my door and I was looking at a radio tower, then nothing but barren hills and sparse pine forrest as far as I could see. The toilet was a not-so-deep pit in the ground, with a wooden board and a hole cut in it. Cows roam freely through the streets (The farmers here haven't yet found any good reason to put them behind fences, and for the most part they do quite a good job of eating weeds and anything else left on the dirt roads of the town.) On my second day in town I opened my laptop to download some pictures and was pleased to find that, for the first time since leaving Moscow, I had a wifi connection to the internet, courtesy of one of the nearby houses...
Olkhon Island itself, outside of Khuzir that is, is truly one of the most beautiful places I've seen in a very long time. I'd even go so far as to say that Siberia (the parts away from cities at least) rivals B.C. for natural beuaty... Long white-sand beaches, open plains, forrests, and even small mountains (or large hills, depending on who you ask) cover the place. There are also many, many cows.
(Below: Here a cow, there a cow... Note the tents and beach in the background. It's not uncommon to wake up on Olkhon with a cow in one's front yard.)
