A boat trip on Lake Baikal

We had a breakfast of champions; it was Russian pancakes (blinis) stuffed with cottage cheese and served with sour cream and jam. We had a polite conversation with mine hostess while we breakfasted, talking about our respective lives, through Josie as our translator. But it transpired that her English was very much better than she had initially let on. 

Then we took car with our guide Helen, who drove us out of town and onto a long straight road through the woods, which she said was still called "Eisenhower's road" more than fifty years after it was built. It had been constructed for a planned visit to Irkutsk by the President of the United States - but the visit was cancelled after the Gary Powers U2 spy plane incident in 1960. 

We passed rows of huge detached houses, set back in the woods, all ostensibly built after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. Our guide Helen told us her story, of marriage, motherhood, divorce and making ends meet through the tough years of the early nineties. Originally a translator in the technical field of geology, she told us that she had become a trader of small things - mainly children's and babies clothes -  out of China. She told us that as a single mum she and her children had built a house by themselves, taking six years to do so. But the house had burnt down, and had not been insured. And who wants to buy a plot of land where a house has burnt down? That is unlucky. What struck me about the story was that she expressed little or no regret or bitterness at her poor luck or the circumstances and times in which she lived - but had pressed on regardless. I have met similar Russians - years ago I had a Russian colleague (who strangely enough bore an uncanny resemblance to the murderer Harold Shipman) who lost several hundred dollars out of the top pocket of his shirt, yet who bore his very serious loss with a stoicism and seeming indifference that was truly awe-inspiring to us, his western colleagues.

At the landing stage on Baikal we were ushered onto a small speedboat along with Helen our guide and interpreter, and taken on a boat ride across the Lake. We saw derelict old tugs, a huge floating dry dock, and visited the "Shaman stone" at the outflow of the Angara river. Then we matched pace with the tourist train as it chugged along the side of the lake, through hills and curves and tunnels. We got out to walk through a railway tunnel (Russians don't seem to bother fencing off railways anywhere) and saw where in 1944 an immense rock, tumbling down from on high, had dislodged a train and flung it into the depths of the lake. The wheels of the locomotive were still visible in the clear water; the carriages, with their grisly cargo of bones, deeper down in 80m of water. 

I found our guide's commentary and interpretation somewhat tiresome. This was only because I was well aware of the cost in human life of the building of the Trans-Siberian railway, and I was well aware that every tunnel, cutting and embankment had been paid for in the lives of many slaves, irrespective of how wonderful an engineering achievement it might have been. But if I am fair, she was just telling the story, and giving her country and its history its due.