Irkutsk After the free breakfast we set off for a walk around the city to look at the old wooden houses and other sites. As the backpack zip had completely gone getting off the train the night before we decided to concentrate looking for a new bag. Irkutsk itself was a very small city compared to St. Peter and Moscow and is really just the stop people use to reach the Lake. The city was famous as one of the last places to fall to communist rule and for the orig...

Lake Baikal and the circum Baikal railway Arrived late at Irtkutsk and was met by our guide Lena for the 1hr transfer to the lake side town of Listvyanka. Guy was with us on the transfer but he was staying in a hotel at the end of the village. We were introduced to our hosts Rita and Sasha at our home stay. We then ate lunch with our guide and driver which was a home made traditional soup for a starter and Omul (which is a fish that is indidenous to the lake!...

The 4 Day train journey! This was our longest train journey on the trans-sib part of our adventure. We boarded at Mosow train station at 23:55!! We had a long walk as we were in carraige 1 at the front of the train. We were in a four birth sleeper this time, but with only one other passager, Guy who was English. We slept well to wake up with beautiful scenery around the train. The next few days passed very quickly playing cards and stretching our legs every few...

Our sleeper train to Moscow was OK. We were lucky because even though we had paid for a four berth we got a two berth because we were the end room. We arrived in Moscow at 10am and decided to brave the metro instead of getting a taxi. We managed to buy two five trip tickets using lots of hand gestures (international sign language). We somehow managed to reach our destination as all the metro signs were in Russian and our metro map was in English! Our walk to the ...

Journey to St Petersburg started well by bargaining with a taxi driver to take us to our hostel! The Cuba Hostel is an interesting place, because the buildings have communal stairs they are all in need of maintenance and the walk up two floors to the reception desk had us both wondering what we were walking into. When we arrived at the reception we were met with a warm welcome and the place looked OK so our worries went away. Our train tickets to Moscow hadn't be...