We drove alongside the Angara River (the only river that flows out of Lake Baikal) and soon enough we could see the lake stretching out in front of us. We took a boat across the mouth of the Angara to Port Baikal where we would be staying for a few days.
Port Baikal is a tiny little town with 2 piers and lots of old rusty ships and old rusty railway lines. We walked from the port to Natalia’s Guesthouse, a large wooden house with tons of rooms and a great deck with view of the lake. She greeted us with a lunch of chicken noodle soup, sausages, and barley which tasted incredible after the random train food we had been eating the last few days.
After lunch we went on a several kilometre hike overlooking the lake. Along the way we saw an old lighthouse that was originally on the shore of the lake but was moved up onto the hills after the Russian-Japanese war in the early 1900s. The lighthouse was of a French design but built and given as a gift by the British and is 111 years old. We were joined on our hike by a local dog that we named Laika the Baikal Dog and many many many bugs.
Our hike brought us back to the Port and we stopped at the Port Baikal Museum, a little one room museum that talked about the Circum-Baikal Railroad because Port Baikal is the start of the Circum-Baikal Railway. Until 1900 there was a railroad up to the lake and then again after the lake but no way to get around the lake itself. When Russian went to war with Japan they needed a way to carry military goods further east. They started by using barges to carry train cars across the lake. They could fit 37 carriages on one barge which was 88 meters long. Because the lake was often frozen they ordered 2 icebreakers from England: the Baikal (the larger) and the Angara (smaller) were shipped by rail and by river in pieces and reconstructed in Irkutsk. These barges would run 10 months of the year, 2 months it would be completely frozen over. During those months they would literally push the train carriages across the ice with servants, horses, and soldiers. They would insure the carriages were sent 100m apart from each other so as to not crack the ice. Soldiers themselves would cross on foot and so a house was built halfway across so as to provide a place to rest.
The water of the lake used to come directly up the cliffs alongside it and so in order to build docks for the ice breakers (and other ships) and the eventual Circum-Baikal railroad they constructed an artificial shoreline. In 1905 they started to build the railroad but only built it in 1 direction (starting from Port Baikal). The other direction was built 10 years later. During the Russian Civil War in 1918 the Red Army blew up the station in Port Baikal and part of the tracks so that the retreating White Army couldn’t escape further to the East. The tracks were finally closed in 1956 because of massive floods that were created when building a big dam up the Angara River.
The Circum-Baikal railway in numbers:
--94 km of track (which is preserved as a historical landmark)
--39 tunnels, 57 galleries
--More than 400 bridges
--280 protective walls
--850 total constructions over the 94km in 10 years
After our visit to the museum we went back to the guesthouse, got our bathing suits on and went down to dock. We knew the water was going to be really cold (it was only 5 degrees Celsius!!) so we had to devise a plan that would allow us to minimize our exposure to the water while still being able to say we had swum in the deepest freshwater lake in the world. We found a good dock that had deep enough water to jump into and an easy exit route and went for it! We jumped off the dock twice, once captured on video and once by photograph, and were actually surprised by the water temperature (and the fact that it didn’t feel as cold as we expected).
While getting out of the water Katherine and Addie both cut themselves on the glass that was unfortunately abundantly thrown everywhere. We did some SABC (good thing we’re all trained in first aid and basic wound treatment) on the dock and managed to get Katherine’s foot wrapped up enough and temporarily not bleeding so that she could hobble back to guesthouse. Once there it started bleeding again and we got some better first aid equipment to wash out the cut and take a closer look. None of us are doctors but we were all pretty sure it needed stitching and so we asked Natalia to find the “town nurse” to take a look (I kid you not, there is no hospital, no doctor, simply a town nurse) . She confirmed our diagnosis of stitches and wrapped it up professionally enough to keep it from bleeding until Katherine could get into town to get stitches. Unfortunately we were in Port Baikal. Medical facilities are pretty much nonexistent. So we had to arrange for a ferry to take her, Masha, and Col France back to the other side of the river, a driver to take her to Irkutsk and find her a hospital, wait for them to finish, drive them back, and find a random person with a boat who could then take them back across the river because the ferry doesn’t run that late. Thankfully that was all arranged, they found a free clinic in Russia that seemed to have pretty good medical practice standards (you know, washed hands and gloves and asked all the right questions), got her 7 stitches, and got her back to Port Baikal shortly before midnight. Not exactly how we wanted to end the day but on the whole it could have been a lot worse and Katherine will now have a cool scar and, as Matt said after he tried to kill me with a dumbbell, “every scar tells a story!”
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