Had a wonderful day down at Listvjanka which is the town that serves lake Baikal.

After we collected our bus ticket we tried to find a coffee because we still had a 2 hour wait for the bus. I will include the pictures of how we got to the coffee shop.

Look for ‘Stolovaya’ which means canteen.

As you get closer, keep looing for ‘Stolovaya’ which still means canteen

Turn right and enter the building

Walk through the door in the back corner

Go down the corridor, through the door and turn right.

Continue through the next door & you’re nearly there…….

Through this last for and the servery is ahead of you.

Mind you, when we got on there, the coffee was only 20 rubles (between 60-70 cents a mug so I guess that makes it all worthwhile). It was a fun exercise – a movie of it would have been too large to load to the site.

When we arrived at Lake Baikal we did stick our finger in the lake to test out if it was nice and fresh, and it was. Walked through the town for a short while until the 1 hour boat cruise departed – all they did was go up the coast for half an hour and turn round, rather boring but there were 6 pleasant young people on board and most were good with their English. We then headed down to the local museum which has a wonderful display of the fish at the various levels in the lake – must have been an interesting exercise to get the pressure right on the individual tanks.

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We also ‘went down in a bathysphere and got to see the life forms living at the various depths – right down to 1658 meters, such a pitty that it was only dished out in Russian and that was also too fast for Ian to get much from it. Although interesting here there is no concept of encouraging the tourist trade, there were no handouts so that one could read up on it later.

We got back on the little mini bus for the 1.5 hour return trip to Irkutsk.