Damn this place is Cold!
Trip Start
Oct 22, 2005
1
65
224
Trip End
Ongoing
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Irkutsk,
Russia
Saturday, January 14, 2006
Irkutsk was very quiet at 8am in the morning with not many people on the streets. It was extremely cold as we made our way to a tour office mentioned in the LP guide as we wanted to get a tour out to Lake Baikal. The lake is the world's deepest and contains nearly one fifth of the world's fresh water. Unfortunately the tour office was closed until 10am so we walked around the corner and took refuge from the cold at a restaurant called Fiesta. After some breakfast we went back to the tour office, still closed even though it was 11am, so we decided to seek further refuge in an Internet cafe, Web Ugol. After thawing out and getting some feeling back in our very numb feet, we went outside as saw a huge sign showing it was negative 30 degrees Celsius! This was bloody cold.
Giving up on getting out to see the (we assume completely frozen) Lake Baikal we wandered down to the Regional Museum on the banks of the frozen Angara River. This was also closed! Walking back into the heart of town we passed many traditional wooden cabins and the White House, built in 1804 as the residence of the governors general of Eastern Siberia. It was around this time our digital camera died. Getting out of the freezing cold we headed for the state Department Store and again back to the only open restaurant, Fiesta. After some lunch we figured we'd bail and head back to the train station to wait for the train. At least they had heaters in the waiting room! On the way we drove passed a park filled with ice sculptures, similar to those found at the ice festival in Harbin, China.
When the train arrived we made our way to the ice covered platform and waiting for it to stop. The platform is right next to the train so it was a bit hairy walking on the very slippery ice as the train came to a halt. We had a very close up view of the train wheels. On board we met our cabin companion and settled into our bottom bunks. Only being early in the evening we played some chess with Meg beating both Rick and the cabin guy, Alexander, and went to bed.
