After Lake Baikal we took an 8 hour bus trip back to Irkutsk, spent the day "catching up" before getting a train at 7:00am the following morning to Ulan Ude, an 8 hour journey. Ulan Ude is the capital city of the republic of Buryatia, the centre of Russian Buddhism and has largest statue of Lenin's head in the world - It is 5,500 kilometres from Moscow. We arrived at Olga's, our home for the night and it seemed a bit intimidating. It was an 8 storey block, built ...

After escaping from the train, we made our way to a 'safe' house in Irkutsk. Irkutsk was the last city where the Russian nobility and the White army congregated before the Red army of the revolution made their final push and Russia became a communist state. So it would be from this historic city that we would begin our Siberian campaign. The next day we travelled to Khuzir on Olkhon Island, in Lake Baikal. Lake Baikal, is the world's deepest freshwater lake, 163...

It was 11:15pm Saturday night, the station information board flickered and added a new destination "BNADNBOTOK". It was our train to Vladivostok (they don't spell very well) and as we climbed aboard approaching midnight, it was a strange feeling reminiscent of a 1960's spy story. For the next 4 days this train would be our home. We entered he dining car, attracting barely a glance from the gaunt Russian waiter. The clientele were as we expected - two el...

Finding our platform at Vladimir was characteristically difficult, it turned out that we did not have a platform at all. We were instructed to climb off the platform, physically cross a railway line and wait on a thin strip of asphalt at track level …Surely not! The train arrived and we climbed the 4 feet required to board (no need to "mind the gap"). The train was unbelievable, a continuous line of "back to back" bunk beds, we had never seen so many peop...

Who put the lights out? We awoke at 5:00 am for an early start and the apartment's lights had all blown - packing at speed in the pitch black is a major problem but feeding from the "Dennis Scott book of Boy Scout tips" we had brought a head torch - Bizarre but it did the job. The station was a challenge all over again, our lack of Russian being a major problem - Finally we reached the "correct" platform but were all alone except for a sleeping drunk. The dru...