On Wednesday morning we were picked up early from our hostel (so sad to leave!) and headed off to Olkhon Island for three days. Olkhon is in Lake Baikal, the largest fresh water lake in the world. Getting there, and particularly getting around the island, is something of a logistical challenge so we joined a small tour, led by a local man called Ivan. We were also joined by a Swiss-Czech Australian couple from Adelaide. Ivan organised everything seamlessly and it was really nice to have someone else make all the decisions for us for a little while. Our tour mates were really fun too so it turned out to a be a great trip.
It’s a 5-6 hour journey to Olkhon from Irkutsk. We started off with a long drive, stopping along the way to look at important local Shamanic spots and to get a glimpse of Lake Baikal. We also stopped at a local cafe for a delicious lunch of fried noodles, a fried pie, a fantastic vegetable noodle soup and posy (a type of dumpling eaten by Buryat people, the indigenous people of the area around Lake Baikal). I am really enjoying Russian food so far and though Buryat food has a lot in common with Mongolian food we’ve found it so much fresher. After a 4 hour drive, we reached the car ferry to Olkhon. We drove straight onto the ferry, zipped across the water in about 15 minutes and then we were on Olkhon!
Olkhon has no paved roads so next up we had a very bumpy, hour long drive to our guest house in Khuzhir (the island’s main village). We were lucky to arrive on a warm, cloudless day with a bright blue sky and amazingly clear and calm water. Photos don’t really do justice to the scale of Olkhon, or its rugged beauty. I’ve never been anywhere else like it. To see it as the seasons change must be really cool too – I imagine it feels totally different in the winter when you can just drive straight over the ice to reach it.
After dropping off our bags at our guest house, we went for a very long walk to some famous spots close to Khuzhir. The water was unbelievably clear, but still pretty cold, and none of us were keen to swim. About 1,700 people live on Olkhon and we enjoyed popping into the local stores too. I think they’re like old fashioned Australian general stores, where you can buy ice cream and lollies as well as fresh fruit and vegetables, cleaning supplies, frozen food and shoes.
It was fun to stay in a guest house, something we haven’t done before. It looked like every house in the village had a guest house in the garden. Ours was pretty basic but spotlessly clean and quiet and the food was good. At 6.30pm we all sat down to dinner together. There’s no menu – a simple meal just arrived at our table. We had cucumbers pickled in vinegar, dill and sesame seeds, vegetable rice and a kind of meatball ish thing with gravy. For dessert there were huge sweet yeasted buns stuffed with curd cheese and topped with crumble. After so many carbs and a long day of driving and walking, we crashed early.
After a breakfast of porridge, cheese toast and fried dough drizzled with condensed milk (a very sweet and heavy start to the day), we spent Thursday driving and walking through the north of Olkhon Island, which is a protected area. We spent the day in a UAZ (a vehicle initially designed for the military). They look old but apparently we were in a 2013 model (it definitely did not feel or look like it from the outside). Parts of the drive were so incredibly bumpy we felt like we were in a washing machine. At points the van looked like it would just tip sideways. The drive was fun but we were looking forward to a paved road by the end of the day. We stopped off at lots of different spots on the coastline, including places of significance for the Buryat people and the site of a former Soviet gulag, where prisoners fished huge quantities of fish from the lake. We were able to walk out along cliffs, which are all completely free of fences or warning signs. (This definitely would not be the case in Australia or the US).
We ate lunch outside. We had soup made with a fish found only in Lake Baikal, called omul, delicious sandwiches (something about Russian bread is really so good), home baked biscuits (cookies for our American readers), candied lemon and orange slices and tea brewed with local herbs (it tasted like liquorice, in a good way!).
We made it back to the guest house at about 5pm and despite having spent much of the day driving, we were exhausted. We napped, had dinner (a potato and vegetable stew with pork, tomato and cucumber salad with lots of garlic and a simple butter cake for dessert), did some more travel planning for our upcoming European adventures and then we crashed early again.
On Friday morning, we enjoyed our last meal at the guest house: potato bake, eggs on toast and crepes with condensed milk (I did not realise how popular condensed milk would be here – it’s everywhere!). Then it was back on the road so that we could get back to Irkutsk in time for our afternoon train to Ykaterinberg.