Olkhon Island, Lake Baikal

We arrived to Olkhon Island from Irkutsk after six hours of very bumpy minivan ride from Irkutsk and a short ferry ride. The weather was very cold and windy (10°C), but apparently the weather changes to hot summer day in just a few minutes on the island. The next days we had all the variations of the whether and mostly beautiful sunshine.

We stayed two nights in an international hostel, where we met a lot of interesting people. There were little wooden houses without water or toilet, but we had electricity! We rented out a tent for the third night and camped on the beach. The icy cold water of the lake was refreshing as we dived in from the funny truck-sauna/banya on the beach (a sauna in a truck and stairs directly to the sea). The lake is at its deepest more than 1600 m deep, 700 km long and 60 km wide at the widest place.

Now we are in Irkuts in home stay hostel at Galinas. Galina has an old wooden house where she takes guests when hostels are fully booked. Our flat in the house nearby is extremely clean and nice and we share it with a family from the US. Irkutsk has beautiful wooden houses and lots of churches ;). We have pretty much done all the sights here and we still have a full day to spend here. Our train leaves in the night at 1.30 local time and we will arrive to Yekaterinburg after two nights and two days in the train at 3.00 in the night local time….

Here some pictures from Olkhon Island. The post before from today shows some pictures from the last train journey (Mongolia-Russia).