This morning began with a lot of waiting around and much teasing from the guys about my new Russian friend. Although, it could have been much worse, Andy was thoroughly expecting the walk of shame.

After breakfast I packed up all my stuff and hung around until 11am waiting for our transfer to Irkutsk. Mr. Maxim our driver arrived on time and I loaded up the van and said a big good bye to Nicholai, who managed to communicate to me that I should come back to Listvyanka and have babies with Valera. Small towns, news travels fast, although I couldn't believe Nicholai was having a dig at me about Valera, I thought the idea of spending the rest of my life here with Valera wasn't all that bad. I would have quite happily spent at least a winter cuddled up with him in his little wooden house, a thought I'm sure which will now keep me warm over many winters to come.

The drive to Irkutsk took about one and half hours, the driver dropped us at the station and we went and stored our luggage. It was about 1pm and our train wasn't until 10pm, I had elected that we should spend the day in the this big Soviet, grey mess of a city, rather than Listvyanka, hanging around the hotel. Something now I of course regretted, but clients, unfortunately need to come first

We had a look at a few really colourful churches, which was unexpected and had a nice walk along the river, checking out all the weddings that seemed to be taking place. Irkutsk was much nicer than I thought it would be and even had some information plaques in the park in English. We did end up spending most of the day chilling out in coffee shops before heading back to the station at around 8pm.

When I got there, our train was not on the boards yet, so after having a mild panic attack, which as usual I had to conceal from the group, I realized that there were already two Trans-Siberians in the station and they had both been delayed by over eight hours. That and there were seven platforms and only six slots on the time table board.

Our train eventually came up on the board and we headed over to our carriage. There was a Vodka train group in the compartment in between the two compartments allotted for Tucan, which annoyed the hell out of me as they are a really noisy bunch and they don't travel with a tour leader like Tucan does, so guess who ends up looking after them, yours truly! I made it quite clear to my passengers that I'm their tour leader and that I wasn't giving out free advice to people on the competitions tours. I don't mind helping out independent travelers, but not other tour companies.

Up until this point, Colin, Andy, Paul and I (my cabin mates) had all been really tired, for some reason now we were at last on the train we were all wide awake again so we decided to watch a movie before heading off to bed.