Holidays in Siberia

Happy new year to all of you!

I hope you have enjoyed your Christmas Holidays and the warm winter wherever you are right now. Here in Mongolia current temperatures in the mornings are around minus 30-40°C, which is actually pretty cold. As mentioned before, the temperature is not as bad as it sounds but from my experience the comfort zone ends at around -25°C depending on your clothes, the wind and the time you spend outside. It's kind of funny that the hair at your face like the eye lids, eye brows and the beard start to freeze. So a protection mask is not only absolutely useful because of the bad air quality, but also to keep your face warm. 
The low temperature can actually also become dangerous if you are outside in the wind for a longer time, because you can get frost bites without noticing it. During one hike we had strong headwind and my face became that cold that I couldn't feel my cheek anymore, fortunately nothing happenend, but I noticed how easy something can happen because you don't have pain initially.

But let's go back to the holidays! Over the Christmas and New Year’s Eve I travelled to Lake Baikal in Russia. The first highlight of the journey was already the trip with the Transsib from Ulaanbaatar to Irkutsk. As many things in Russia, the train has a certain kind of sowjet charme. Usually it is characterized by a lot of steel and simple but very effective engineering. In every wagon there is a boiler with hot water, which can be used for instant food for example.

If you wonder, how the train keeps warm at temperature below -40°C, this is the answer:

This steel construction below does actually not more than just open a flat, which empties the content to the track bed.

First we arrived in Irkutsk, which is one of the larger cities in Siberia and a pretty nice one as well. It is named after the Irkut River and is situated roughly 70 km away from Lake Baikal.
An interesting effect of cold, dry air is that even cold water is steaming because of the great temperature difference:

On the next day the air was not that dry and cold, and it looked completely different.

One advantage of a cool air temperature is that you don't have to worry about the preservability of fresh fish for example. You can also buy ice cream on that market.

After one night in Irkutsk we went to Olkhon Island which is said to be one of the prettiest spots on Lake Baikal. Quite unusually for this time of the year we could still take the ferry, though at some parts there was already thin ice on the lake. When the lake is completely frozen, people just drive on the ice. For the transition when the ice is too thick to be passed by ferries and to thin to carry cars there is a hovercraft as a connection to the island.

On that island we took a tour with one of the old russian busses (sowjet charme!) that can be found everywhere.

Driving trough snow is somehow similar to driving in soft sand, but also different as it is a bit more unpredictable on how the car is going to react to steering.

One destination during that day trip was a Gulag from stalin times, where prisoners were forced to work in a fish factory. Only the foundation of the hall and few remains indicated the former location of the camp. I was especially surprised that there was an information table about some notable plant species - but nothing about the concentration camp. Later I found out that some people of our tourist group didn't know what Gulags are. Because of the beautiful weather, the stunning view on the lake and the lack of information they did  not noticed what kind of place this was at all and what horrible things happened some decades ago.

One seperated bay was completely frozen and we could drive over massive ice. That was a strange feeling in the beginning...

Shamanism is widely spread in that part of Russia and in Mongolia as well. Also our bus driver believed in shamanism, maybe that kept us alive. These stone piles are one way to express their feelings. Don't ask me why they do it, but anyway it was a nice place to walk around and see the sun slowly descending at the horizon.

After Olkhon Island and one more night in Irkutsk we took the train to Baikalsk to go skiing for three days. Luckily it was incredibly warm (up to -4°C!), there was fresh snow and it felt like we were the only ones on the slopes, so skiing conditions were perfect! The highlight was the incredible view on Lake Baikal.

That's how it looks like if there is a lot of snow:

The craziest story happened on the way from Baikalsk to Ulan-Ude, before we headed back to Mongolia. I am very sorry, but this story is restricted to personal telling only :-)
Just one piece: Because of a mistake, these great policemen were searching for me and brought me safe and sound to Ulan-Ude.

Ulan-Ude is famous for its good variety of fancy bars..

...and their love to pink donkeys.

Christmas is celebrated on January 7th in Russia and Christmas holidays start with new years eve. New years eve itself was not extensively celebrated in Ulan-Ude. Nearly all shops, bars and restaurants were closed and on midnight just a few firecrackers were fired. Some Russians told me that they celebrate new years eve with vodka and family.
But on January 1st there was a large event on the main square with the largest bust in the world - showing the head of Stalin. It started with a brass band with musicians dressed up like Santa Claus. Afterwards, young people were conducting a great performanace where they probably had to practice the whole year for, including a lot of different costumes, fun music, a dog sledge and Ded Moroz and Snegurochka as protagonists.

Ded Moroz and Snegurochka

I didn't really get the story, but at one point a lot of tropical animals were rushing on the field and danced along to the soundtrack of the movie Madagascar. Maybe the story was about christmas being the time where everybody should celebrate together, regardless of their background.

For sure they brought some tropical atmosphere to icy Siberia

I hope you liked the pictures and they could illustrate that I really liked the trip to Russia :-)
I was especially inspired by the kindness and hospitality of the Russian people (except for train conductors :D). Even though most of the Russians I met didn't speak English, they really tried to understand my gestures and signs when I was trying to talk to them using body language. Usually it worked quite okay, sometimes it was also possible to communicate via google translator. Anyway I would have liked to have some good talks with Russians, so I have to come back to Russia to catch up for that!

Time flies, and I only have 7 weeks left in Mongolia, let's see what will happen during that time!

All the best

Malte