Irkutsk [fast water]
Irkutsk March 8, 2020After a good night's sleep, I wake up at 7:30 a.m. and meditate. All devices are charged except for the drone, which is now connected to the network because we will need it in the next few days. At the breakfast table of the pianist Nina (who is listed on OSM, not on Google, and once hosted Tesson), we meet a French woman who spends every winter on the island of Olkhone, I suspect a shamanistic background. Two other Frenchmen join us, father and son from Rodez with a southern accent. Irina from BaïkalVoyage calls us to ask about us. Since yesterday, Moscow has been putting all French (and others) into a 14-day quarantine, and two other tour groups have canceled because of this. Bad business for Irina, she sounds desperate, we are the last excursion group for now.
A short tour of the city makes it clear to us on the one hand what -12º means and on the other hand that it is Sunday and everything is closed. We have lost all sense of time! The
only outflow of the Baikal, Angara, is a mighty river just 200m away from here. You have the impression of being close to the sea. The water is open, individual ice floes drift
past, the air cuts into your face and hands despite overgloves. The cityscape is quite modern, interspersed with a few wooden houses that are rather neglected.
At 1pm we are picked up by the tour guide Aldar for lunch. There is a sumptuous 4-course menu with salad to start, solyanka soup as a starter, fish with roasted cauliflower and apple strudel with vanilla ice cream and compote for dessert + espresso.
After that a tour of the city begins. Aldar is Buriate, that is a local tribe of Mongolian descent, and he is clearly and happily Russian. He tells us about the politics from 1661, when the Cossacks founded the city, to today. We walk past three beautiful churches to the 2º cold Angara and see two divers floating past. The river flows too fast to freeze.
Then we go on to various wooden houses, which we don't even take photos of anymore, we have already seen so many. But we understand more about the local mentality, a relatively new toy RAV4 is parked in front of the door of one of the houses, where there is neither a toilet, nor central heating, nor running water, Eriz comfort so to speak. Every 50m there is a water tap on the sidewalk, the base of which becomes so quickly covered with ice that it has to be removed every 14 days.
We also visit a memorial to the end of World War II, which we don't understand at first, as there was no war here. But Aldar then explained to us that the Buryats were withdrawn
from the China front and intercepted the German Wehrmacht 16km from Moscow, then intervened decisively in Stalingrad and liberated all of China, Thailand and Korea from the
Japanese after May 9, 1945.
By standing around for a long time while Aldar explained things, we unintentionally tested our equipment: in the end we didn't bring too much with us, double thick socks in Karibou snowshoes, long underwear, ski pants, arctic parka and chapka make us slowly freeze after 4 hours, despite the bright sun.
Irkutsk March 9, 2020