Lake Baikal - the deepest freshwater lake in the world

It was still dark when the train pulled into Irkutsk Station. Fortunately I had someone waiting for me and he drove me the 70 km to the small village of Listvyanka besides Lake Baikal. The journey took about an hour and was a little hair raising as he swerved all over the place to miss potholes.

I'm staying with a Russian family for two nights in an apartment block. They have two teenagers. One of them, Gideon, speaks some English as he is studying it at school. The daughter only speaks a little French. Their dad works for the marine researchers and their mum at the hotel. Her English is very good though I haven't seen much of her. I think I am sleeping in their bedroom.

After some fish pancakes for breakfast, I went for a walk up to the top of a high hill behind their home. The views of the lake were really splendid. I could only just make out the mountain on the far side, as the lake is between 20 and 40 miles wide and 400 miles long. It is also incredibly deep and drops down to 1637 m quite near to the shore. So you shouldn't wade out into the water too far. It is also apparently the deepest freshwater lake in the world and they say that if all the world's drinking water ran out tomorrow, Lake Baikal could supply the entire population of the world for the next 40 years. It is also very clear and completely safe to drink because of the filtering action of the numerous types of sponge which live in its depths.

Back at the apartment block the children had woken up and as soon as they had eaten, they took me for a walking tour of the village. One of our first stop was a craft shop which had a sign outside which said in English “Welcome”. The shop turned out to be someone's front room. Everything was priced in dollars and astronomically high. Obviously Lake Baikal is firmly on the tourist map. This was confirmed a little way up the street in the golden domed church. Outside there was a notice in English which said “no smoking on the territory of the Church”. However, I didn’t notice any other tourists. As we had walked quite a long way from the apartment, we caught a bus back which was free.

The children cooked us some lunch and then I went for walk by myself beside the lake. I didn't go far as I was still a little “jetlagged” and suffering from a lack of sleep the previous night. I sat on the bank besides the water and just watched the boats go by for the rest of the afternoon. As the weather has been quite hot lately the water looked very inviting, but I soon found it to be icy cold.

That night I slept very well. Although I had become used to sleeping on a train, it was nice to sleep on a comfortable bed on good old terra firma. After breakfast the two children took me down to the nearby Limnological Institute and Museum. This had been set up to study the marine life and animals in the Baikal area. Gideon told me that over 80% of the species in their lake cannot be found anywhere else in the world. This includes the freshwater seals which are very rare. The displays in the museum were very interesting though there wasn’t much in English.

After lunch, their dad took us all out on his boat for a couple of hours. We first visited Port Baikal which is only a short distance from the village. It was here that the Trans Siberian line came down from Irkutsk. Before 1904 the passengers and the train had to board the 290 foot icebreaker, the Baikal, for the crossing to Mysovaya. At one stage, when the ice was too thick, they laid rails across the lake and threw water up on them to freeze them to the ice. Then in about 1904 a railway was built around the lake so that the ship became redundant. A new shortcut has now since been built. It was to this old railway line that we visited. The trip was very enjoyable as the coastline and ragged cliff are all very beautiful.

Comments (0)