Arriving in Irkutsk at 8 am, we found our honcho who took us on an hour bus ride to Lake Baikal. When your driver's throwing on dark techno early on a Wednesday morning and his car freshener just reads 'sex first', you're in safe hands. After some crazy overtaking, we arrived at the chalet by the lake, got some borscht and went over to the lake museum. Although interesting, this is just a bit of a fact-dropping wikipedia situation until they show you the different fish and creatures that exist only in the lake, and their seriously overfed and underhoused seals... From here we picked up some quadbikes to ride through the Siberian mountains. We got 4 quadbikes between the 8 of us. I was paired with this funny Italian guy, whose confidence heavily outweighed his skill. He flipped the quadbike and we rolled down a little piece of the mountain. After rolling it back on track, the Russian guy leading us had made his way back to see what the hold up was, so we just whipped our cams out and pretended to absorb the scenery, which was actually incredible. Though we found out later that the area we'd been cruising about had a high concentration of lynx and bears!

After the 4-night train and accummulating a thick layer of dust from the quadbiking we thought the best way to cleanse would be banya! So we hopped in the sauna, sweat it out in 60 degree heat and unbearable humidity, then when you've had enough you go into another room and hit eachother with bunches of dried branches and leaves. You finish by hopping under a freezing shower and repeat this for as long as you feel up to it. This rinses your energy so we rounded it off with a few cups of fruity tea overlooking the mountains and ate some of the fish from the lake, omul!

Our 2nd day in Baikal didn't start as planned. We'd hoped to get a boat and float around the lake catching some scenery, but bush fires had created a thick mist and unfortunately you couldn't see much of the landscape. Instead we rode around on some mountain bikes for a bit, went into this yard to see some old Soviet vehicles and bumped into this lady from Swindon that we'd met on the 4-night train. We all went back to our chalet , put together a camp fire and cooked a bit of omul on it.

All this Omul was getting to the waistline, and after realising I'd not gone for a run since my Fitness First days, me and one of the guys went jogging around a little piece of the lake, met the others at a man-made beach and took a freezing dip in Baikal. This woke us up and got us ready for the bus back to Irkutsk, which disappointingly had less techno this time. For our day in Irkutsk, the honch wanted to show us everything and rapidly run through its history. So we crammed in a tally of statues, churches, uni buildings and historical landmarks and by the end of it we were pretty Russia'd out, and ready to board the 2-nighter to Mongolia!