Land O'Lake

Olkhon Island is the largest island on Lake Baikal. It is home to approximately 1500 people. To get to the island, you can take a ferry whenever the lake isn't frozen, you can drive on the ice when the lake is frozen over, and when the ice starts to melt in early spring, you can only reach the island by plane. It is a 5 hour drive from Irkutsk.

Most of the hostels and home stays are in the largest village, Khushir. From Khushir, you can book tours or rent bikes. We chose to just walk around the first afternoon and rent bikes the second day. Our third day we took a bus back to Irkutsk.

Emily fell just short of getting to the top (insert height joke here).

The island is beautiful, as you can see in our photos, and we could imagine spending an entire summer there in the future. The bike ride was fun, even though Emily got quite tired. We were going to try to bike to a small lake that is mineral rich, and will turn your skin red if you stay in too long. We discovered very quickly however, that the lake was behind two sets of hills. The first set went up about 1000 meters, and the second we never really got to. The first hill got steep enough for Emily to give up on the ride and just walk the bike up (she claims it was faster to walk the bike than to ride it, although she couldn't go much slower haha). The view was amazing, but we decided that it would be better to just continue up the road rather than attempt the second hill.

Beautiful view less than 15 minutes from our home stay.

The priest at the church played those bells for a few minutes. He also speaks pretty much fluent French and English. The next picture is the sunset from the very same church. We found out the stay is free as long as you do some labor.

We went to a cove that had what appeared to be a man-made sandbar that would create a small lake during low-tide. We took a break there and drank some of the lake water. That's something we discovered about Lake Baikal on the bus ride to Olkhon Island; you can drink the water. The lake takes up an area greater than all five Great Lakes combined, and someone told us that it is around 1000 meters deep. That's nearly 4000 feet. It's also longer than the country of Austria. And to top it off, the lake gets so cold in the winter it freezes over enough for someone to drive on.

Steamed Omul (it may not look pretty, but it is delicious), and Emily drinking from Lake Baikal.

After the bike ride, we went back to Olga's for dinner. A fter dinner, we got to do a Russian banya, which is basically a dry sauna followed by a cold bath. It was the perfect end to our first Lake Baikal excursion.