Expatiperro

The Russian leg of our trip officially began at 3 PM on September 20th, though for the previous seven hours we sat just feet away from the border with little to do but twiddle our thumbs and pretend that the increasing pressure in our bladders had nothing to do with a need to pee, since the bathrooms were locked and no amount of pleading would persuade the snarling carriage attendant to open them. We were waiting to cross the Mongolia-Russia border, which one could have easily thought was in a war zone due the the security measures in place to stop illegal smuggling. Passport photos were studiously compared with the faces of their holders; armed guards marched on the platform next to the train peeking under the carriage; brusque border officials kicked us out of our cabin to search the luggage compartments. Then we moved fifty feet, crossed a chain-link fence that marked the border, and repeated the entire process again, in case one of us had suddenly conjured up 75 contraband leather jackets in the ten minutes since Mongolian customs. During this entire process, at no time were we allowed to leave the train or, in a cruel Soviet-style twist, use the bathroom. Instead of letting us relieve ourselves, the carriage attendant spent the day tending to her nails, eating soup, and vacuuming the entire cabin. Twice.

After a day of a front-row seat to bureaucratic inefficiency and OCD cleaning, we were finally on Russian tracks, and 12 hours later we were in a cold and rainy Irkutsk. Irkutsk is the unofficial capital of SIberia, which makes it one of the few outposts in one of the most vast and remote swathes of land on the planet. Even though it's the principal city in the region and one of Russia's main cities, it had a certain backwater feeling to it. The tram we took from the train station to our hostel looked straight out of 1950, with corrugated metal sides, a peeling Soviet red-and-white paint job, and a complete lack of functioning gauges on the driver's control panel (which the driver gave her complete, um, divided attention to as she chatted away on her cell phone). The city's buildings seemed to be sinking into the slowly melting permafrost, which surprisingly didn't render them uninhabitable; Kyle spotted one man leaving from partially-sunk house whose doorway had shrunk to no more than 3 feet tall.

The 35 degree temperature, freezing rain, and the fact that most of the city's sights were closed made our only day in Irkutsk a short one. But the next morning we were up early to meet our Mongolia to Irkutsk cabin-mates Andy and Charlotte at the bus station. We were off to Listvyanka, a town an hour from Irkutsk by public bus and the jumping off point (literally) for Lake Baikal. It's impossible to adequately describe the immensity and beauty of the Lake. The water is a deep, incomparable shade of blue which stretches beyond the horizon on one side, and on the other is just the foreground to jagged snow-capped mountains. The clear, brisk air makes the reds, yellows, and oranges of the autumn trees seem even more vivid than they already are. But despite the stunning scenery around the Lake, all the area's energy focuses down towards the water. There's just no escaping it. We knew that we had to dive in.

We dropped our bags at our guesthouse, threw on our swimsuits, and set off on a walk along the shore to scout potential jumping-in sites. Along the way, we explored abandoned barges, filled our cameras' memory cards with pictures of the views, hiked up into the hills, and took a chairlift to a viewpoint with panoramic views of the Lake. And with the sun going down and the temperature not getting any warmer, it was go time. With a Russian family cheering us on, we did the deed.



The follow-up to the swim might have been the funniest part of the day. To celebrate, we returned to the same restaurant where we had eaten lunch, and whose waitress had laughed in our faces when we asked her if she knew any good places from which to jump in. This time, we came armed with the video of our swim, which drew an "Oh God" and an eye-roll when we showed her it. After she took our order, though, we noticed that she wouldn't stop staring at us. Maybe she was in awe of our amazing cold-water tolerance? Not quite. A few minutes later she comes up to the table, points at Kyle, and says, "You... actor? Lost?" Despite our denials that Kyle was not, in fact, Matthew Fox (the star of the TV show Lost, for you non-addicts), she wouldn't take 'no' for an answer, and so our meal ended with a photo and most likely the highlight of our waitress' day. If you hear any rumors that Matthew Fox has gone off the deep end and is traveling around Siberia taking dips in freezing cold lakes, you know where they started.


A bonfire with other Trans-Siberian travelers ended our night, and the next morning we returned to Irkutsk to catch the longest train ride of our trip, across Siberia to Yekaterinburg.