So waking up fairly early we headed down to the Bus station with another solo female backpacker from Canada. Typical sort of thing fairly ugly, not much banter doing some pansy degree somewhere. The previous day we had booked 3 spaces on a taxi to go to Olcon Island with a fat Mongol looking man. Immediately as we approached the bus station a fat Mongol man approached us asking I we want to go to Olcon. So as I thought this was the fat Mongol man we needed we pro...

We arrived in Irkutsk welcomed by sunlight. The first we had seen in about 5 days. From Irkutsk we had planned to spend one night on the shores of Lake Baikal in Listvyanka a Siberian version of Blackpool with seals instead of donkeys, jet skis instead of the pleasure beach but one thing remained the same, you could still get kebabs. Although Listvyanka kebabs were in a different league to British kebabs they actually contained meat for a start and were cooked on...

"So, why are you in Omsk?" This was asked to us a few times now. This did not fill us with joy considering we decided to spend 10 hours in the wonderful city. So exiting the train we had to deposit our bags in the left luggage which was the most highly secured fortress I had ever entered. A heavily armed policeman allowed us to enter the metal gated area one at a time and demanded our passport. After a few minutes of shouting at each other and pointing we finall...

Wow. So much has happened since the last timed I blogged. So picking from Yekaterinburg, we stayed in a hostel that again had no signage to indicate that there was actually a hostel. If only Russia used appropriate marketing and advertising then everything would run a hell of a lot more smoothly. Did the normal thing in the city. Saw the sights blah blah blah. Ate traditional village sausage and cabbage rolls. You realise that most cities are the same and there...

The next day we were starting our 30 hour train ride to Yekaterinburg. This commenced with a little stress as we arrived with 20mins to spare and we were not allowed to board the train only giving us an entirely Russian explanation. We deduced that we would have to get some tickets as we bought the train tickets on the Internet. So walking the 1km length of the train again we promptly find a ticket office and redeem our voucher which thankfully was an easy painle...