Great set-up here in Irkutsk, 'administrative capital of Eastern Siberia', which I've been in today after a frankly terrifying two hour taxi transfer from the countryside. I'm sitting in a corrugated iron hut with twenty computers and one fan. Temperature has once again hit the 30s, and I'm about to get on a train to Mongolia!
To finish off after the birch stick charade, I stumbled out of the banya into the Russian farmhouse connected, where the Russian woman running the place cooked me dinner over the blaring of a TV in the corner.
'Massive storm in Moscow,' she informed me over rice, and gestured towards the news report. The tropical weather had caught up with the city I was in a few days before, and battered everything in sight.
Needless to say, it wasn't long before the same storm made its happy way down to the little Siberian village of Listvyanka. Grabbing a beer from the nearby convenience store (licencing hours don't exist in Russia) around midnight, I sat with a couple of people from the hostel on a bench overlooking Lake Baikal. It was about half an hour into my 'Ruski No.7' beer that I noticed jagged flashes miles across the water. The rain started, almost imperceptibly, as a group of drunken Chinese tourists struck up a spontaneous conversation with us.
At the first faint sound of thunder, we legged it back up to our middle-of-nowhere farmhouse and managed to duck inside as the rain began properly with a vengeance. By the time we'd entered one room, we were trapped inside by the force of the gale.
I made the mistake of saying, 'This is really like a horror movie' as the thunder began to shake our corrugated iron roof and rain began to seep through the poorly enforced windows. Predictably, my announcement came immediately before a power cut.
The awesome darkness of that Siberian valley was the kind of darkness you NEVER get in England, as every single house was plunged into pitch black. The people who had managed to throw themselves into the room I was in gathered at the window and enjoyed an amazing view of an extremely rare thing: a monsoon storm in Russia. Lightning periodically transformed the farmhouses and the mountain goats into figures blazingly illuminated, far brighter than daylight, before the impenetrable darkness again.
The geek of the group produced a reading light you can attach to your head as a torch. We all judged her.
The next day in Listvyanka was spent being bullied up a mountain, round a cliff, and into the Siberian forest by the same sadistic Russian man who beat me with birch sticks. I don't want to talk about it, except to say I have injuries. Most are, admittedly, emotional, but were slightly tempered by the existence of a private beach (you only have to be mad enough to rock climb through the Siberian mountains in heat lovingly accompanied by blinding fog to get there, too!)
Now I'm sitting in Irkutsk, waiting to catch the train to Mongolia, catching y'all up. Irkutsk, for what it's worth, is a funny mixture of new-builds and the land that time forgot - like Listvyanka, there are rusty hammer-and-sickles and communist stars that remain stubbornly attached to every other lamppost, and a massive statue of Lenin chokes on the fumes of hundreds of passing Toyotas and Landrovers, wrapped around with telephone wires. His outstretched stone hand among the dodgy sellers advertising very sad camel rides and even sadder 'dancing bear experiences' is a bit poignant, a bit vulgar, a bit something else. Just to push the effect even further, I ate pizza at a fast food place directly opposite this very same statue only an hour ago. Sorry, Lenin. It feels a bit like I'm mocking the corpse I paid 300R to see back in Moscow not so long ago - but damn, pizza is good.
Mongolia here I come. I'm not exactly relishing the two days I'm about to spend back on the Trans-Siberian Express, especially since the temperature is faithfully climbing once again (it knows instinctively when I'm about to take public transport.) I'm also somewhat apprehensive about the 'approximately eight-hour - sometimes four, sometimes fourteen' border crossing from Russia, which involves changing the wheels of the train and a shitload of classic Russian bureaucracy. Expect to be woken rudely at 3 in the morning by a provodnitsya shaking a baton and demanding your passport. They'll probably also want to see the endless, endless streams of paper you have to gather from each hostel in Russia along the way - all costing between 100 and 500R each, which is a price hike of 2GBP to 14GBP in pure administration.
Never mind, though! Adventure, adventure, adventure! Ulaanbaatar, the capital I know absolutely nothing about! Mongolian ger camps! Fermented mare's milk! (I'm serious.) Bring it on... back to the Trans-Siberian Express I go.
See you all - metaphorically of course - in two days.
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