Still in Ulan Batar

We’re still in Ulan Batar in Mongolia. This is simply an ugly city, filled with dust and rubble, and it feels they are either constructing it while we are here or destroying it. We met again Teresa here, a Spanish girl that we met previously on Olkhon Island and  a lot of interesting people. There's nothing else to do here than to talk until you either continue traveling or you go to the countryside.   So here we are, just talking and walking around while we’re waiting for Felicie and Jen to join us to our travel through Mongolia’s countryside. 
So, I was telling about our first journey on the train, which eventually finished and we got to our first stop in Siberia...


Irkutsk
After almost 4 days without any shower, we got to Irkutsk. I won’t write about the history of Irkutsk, capital of Siberia, anyone can google it. We got there on a sunny Friday, this time we arrived at a nice hostel called Baikaler where we met lots of backpackers. There we decided that Russia is also a very nice country, with weirdly friendly Russians. Many times happened that when we asked for directions we got a guide to the actual place! For example, we had a ride on the car of some guy to the mall, after he asked by phone if the shop had the charger for the camera we were looking for; we had an old guy walking 20 minutes with as until the Decembrists’ Houses when we asked for directions. People were actually thrilled that there are foreigners that decided to see their city! But it was actually a really nice small and cosy city. 

Here, we started to notice the interesting mix between Catholic Russian people and Shamanic/Tibetan Buddhist Buryati people which get to its climax at Ulan Ude near the border with Mongolia.
In any case, we managed to see a lot of Irkutsk in one day and to book tickets for the 6 hours bus to Olkhon Island in the lake Baikal on the following day. So we were going to spend the following days enjoying a breath taking landscape, instead of just getting to the nearest village that borders the lake and continue to Asia. 

On our way to Olkhon Island

 



Olkhon Island - Lake Baikal
On Saturday May 21st, we arrived at Olkhon Island on the center of the deepest lake in the world. There, we felt the immensity and the cold of Siberia.  
 

 
We stayed at Olga’s house, it was a local family’s house that was open for travelers. She moved her husband out of the main part of the house (and of the the kitchen and TV) which was separated from Olga and her husband’s room, hired a cook (or maybe it was her mom?) and started to host travelers. We were fed day and night with huge amounts of home-made food, and it was hard seeing the cook’s hearth broken each time we couldn’t finish the whole dish. But of course, none of the hosts spoke English, and by that point we only learned *some*  numbers, and some basic words.

This is breakfast

And these are Olga's chickens

 
We got surviving tips from backpackers that were there that night and left the following morning. So we learned that we would have to avoid wild dogs that were common on the island and that biking there was going to be hard. The first day was rainy, and since seven winds control the weather of the island the forecast was unknown. There was still ice over the water of the lake, which was going to disappear gradually in the following days. 

 
 

Some Buddhist prayer flags in a hill

So that first day, around 10pm, after a day of changing winds and rains, we went to sleep (still with sunlight).
We stayed there two more sunny and windy days, and biking was indeed hard, and it was cold, really cold. They were a couple of relaxing days, we walked around, we played cards and games with the backpackers that also stayed there (and we were going to meet again in Mongolia).

 
 
An interesting aspect of Olga's house (and of any house in the island) was that there was no bathroom there, the toilets were holes on the ground in two small wooden houses and of course, there were no showers. So we took a “banya” once, instead of having a shower, which is essentially an uncontrollable extremely hot sauna which ends with a bucket of cold water over your head.

In those days, Iohi realized that she couldn't find her migration card anywhere , a small sheet of paper we received when we enter to Russia, and she was going to need it to leave the country... But we were still going to make another stop before leaving the country...

Ulan Ude, capital of Republic of Buryatia, but still Russia 

So we left the island, got back to Irkutsk, bought our train tickets for the 7 hours night journey to Ulan Ude, and waited in Irkutsk for a couple of hours. During these couple of hours, Iohi managed to discover a tick on her hair and since she forced me to look about the "Tick-Borne Encephalitis" that she read was common on that island, we started to panic... Anyway my mom checked in the Kfar Saba hospital, what to do, and I guess that by this time we are sure that either the tick didn't bite, which I'm pretty much sure, or the tick wasn't infected, which is most likely for a tick.

Anyway, we took our train around 10pm, this time we traveled in platzkart, third class. We heard so many people that traveled that way that we decided to give it a try and to save some money. We almost didn't sleep, it was 7 hours of people getting in and out, turning the lights on and off, and we finally arrived at Ulan Ude at 6:30am. Ulan Ude is a city still in Siberia, pretty close to Mongolia, and it is the capital of Buryatia -Buryatis are pretty much Mongolians that live in that area.

So we got there on the morning, there was no bus, no trams, and when we were trying to understand the map, a Buryati guy came and asked in Russian what we understood as "Do you need help?". He walked  20 minutes with us talking all the time in Russian, saying "I love you Argentina", and we "understood" that he was a veteran marine soldier and he was a shaman (or something about a shaman) and that he was very happy to see tourists in his town. Hostels don't have signs in Russia, so we walked 10 minutes around the place where we thought that the  hostel was, and the guy even called the hostel by phone.
We finally found the Ulan Ude hostel, and I think that the highlight of this stop was actually the hostel and the owner, Dennis, a Buryati linguist with a fluent English, who claimed to have learned English from Schwarzenegger in Terminator 2.
So we followed Dennis indications and walked through the main street and then traveled to a near Datsan (Buddhist temple), which was the most important one for Buryatis according to him...

Ivolginsky Datsan, 23 km from Ulan Ude

Salty green tea with sheep milk and some buza (like kreplach) that we had near the datsan

Girls celebrating their last day of school at the main street of Ulan Ude

And that was pretty much everything, from there we skipped a 24 hours and very expensive train and we decided to travel with a 12 hour bus which went exactly through the same way. There, in the border, our passports were going to be checked again and again and again, and Iohi still didn't find the migration card... However, the big surprise was that damn sheet of paper was actually inside Iohi's passport kind of stuck between two pages...

And that bring us to Ulan Batar, capital of the Dust and Rubble.

 

At the beginning

Ok, we are now in Mongolia, we is me and Iohanna, my partner in the adventure and owner of most of (but not all!) the pics. We’ve already been 2 weeks traveling since we flew from Israel and we have taken 4 ½ days of trans-Siberian trains  through Siberia and ½ a day  bus to Ulan Batar, capital of Mongolia. We’re investigating now how to  visit the country side, and after we visit it, we are travelling to  China with the trans-Mongolian train and then eventually we’ll get to India. But now I’m hesitating about writing in my broken non-native English or my broken native Argentinean Spanish. I’ll try in English  for the time being, but let’s start from the beginning...

At Ben Gurion Airport in Israel on May 14th
We started our journey at the airport, as any long journey that starts in Israel should begin. Since Israel and her neighbours don’t have the best relationship there’s no way but to fly over most of the countries that surround Israel. No train or bus can go very far from Israel...
Our first stop was going to be Moscow. At 3:30am on the morning we discovered that even though we need no visa to enter to Russia (both as Israelis and as Argentineans), we needed a ticket out that we didn’t have (since we weren’t supposed to left Russia by air). So 2 hours and a half before our flight, we ran downstairs where some flight agencies work and we managed to buy a ticket that my parents cancelled 2 days later.




Moscow
At 6am we get to a rainy Moscow, and a couple of hours later we get to a stinky hostel: the Trans-Siberian Hostel. Not so much to tell about Moscow. But  thanks to Eduardo and Tatiana, who are friends of a friend, Yana, we had a pleasant time. But the weather didn’t help much, neither  the expensive prices of everything, neither the fact that the Kremlin was closed the day we intended to visit it...  We did do sightseeing, space museum, gallery arts, walkings but I’d describe Moscow as a city as expensive as Paris and London, but not being neither Paris nor London... Anyway, we bought there our tickets for the first journey on the train to Irkutsk and after 2 nights at the hostel we left the city.

Raining...

Metro

Garage Center for Contemporary Culture

3 ¾ days on a a kupe -second class wagon-  on the first trans-sibierian train.
Looking back on what we did, I think we over reacted. Almost 4 days on a train! In Moscow we felt  “Let’s get out of here! It’s cold and rainy and expensive and rather uninteresting, let’s go as fast as possible to Asia” (I know that Siberia is also in Asia, but c’mon!) When we got to Irkutsk, we felt, well, this is nice, we could have stopped before and visited another town on our way!
Anyway, on the train, we spent most of the time sleeping, planing what to eat, playing cards, reading. We both thought it’ll be inspiring, that we’d be able to write or draw, I don’t know... But the movement has more of an intoxicating effect, we felt kind of drunk...

The kupe has room for 4 people, but most of the time, we were alone. We didn’t have much interaction with the people on the train. We learnt the numbers and some words in Russian from one of the passengers that spent  one day with us, we tried to avoid a drunk teenager who was obsessed with us and with red eyes and spiting kept following us and repeating something about Finland!, and we held our breath whenever a really stinking family was near us. But most of our travel fellows didn’t know a word of English, and we just kept to ourselves.

The Finland-obsessed spiting drunken Russian "comunicating" with me.

More pics at Iohi's picasa site