Rolling hills of the Olkhon Island on Lake Baikal, Russia. How many times can you say beautiful, stunning, amazing, vast, breathtaking etc, etc? Doesn’t matter, because it won’t capture the feeling of it all. Island of Olkhon is the largest island in Lake Baikal, and it – along with the Lake (or Sea, as most…
Founded: 1652 Population: 588,000 House Museum of Volkonsky noble family exiled to Siberia after a failed Decembrist revolution. Irkutsk, Russia. Irkutsk was the most anticipated stop on the whole journey for us because of the much celebrated Russian lake Baikal – the world’s largest reserve of fresh water, as well as, the deepest lake in…
Founded: 1550 by Ivan the terrible, as a military fortress-town on an island to conquer Kazan’. Pop: 250 With two days allocated for Kazan exploration, we spent first exploring city portion of Kazan. On the second, we decided to venture into countryside. The idea evolved from our desire to take Volga river cruise, which was…
We have some differences over what to consider the official start day of our trip. When someone asks – how long have you been traveling, Sergey announces that we have been on the road since 3 August, which is when we moved out of www.victorianinbloom.com in DC and became homeless; for Jenia, the trip started…
Founded: 1628 Pop: 974,000 Train station in Krasnoyarsk We rolled into Krasnoyarsk at 7:30 am local time / 3:30 am Moscow time. In just 6 days we conquered 4 time zones. Luckily train is conducive to sleeping so the jetlag was hardly noticeable. Notable fact: we shelled out the big bucks for our 34-hour ride…
Founded: 1723 Pop: 1.4 million Other names: Sverdlovsk Yekaterinburg Train Station We had just 6 hours in Yekaterinburg, which wasn’t a great deal — but enough to see memorials to the town’s somber history. Russia’s last tsar and his family were shot and then bayoneted to death in Yekaterinburg in July of 1918. The building…
Founded: 1005 Pop: 1.1 million Gleaming Kazan train station. We were most impressed with Kazan from the moment the train pulled into the station. Clean, modern, even slick. Beautiful city, colorful, interesting people (and many of them). Budget friendly too – we paid only 100 rubles for bag storage at the train station, whereas in…
Founded: 1221 by Grand Duke Yuri II Pop: 1.2 million Other names: Gorky Monument to NN founder Yuri Vsevoldovich and his teacher Simon We took high speed train – Sapsan – from Moscow, which got us there in just 4 hours. Fun fact: St Petersburg is the same distance from Moscow as Nizhniy Novgorod, but…
Stuck at the border crossing at Naushki, Russia for 5 hours. Talked to the customs officer, made a new friend, Chema from Spain, and helped out a nice Japanese gentlemen – Shinya Watanabe(shinyawatanabe.net)
Our last day in Russia – spent in Ulan Ude. We saw the city, visited Russia’s center of Buddhism, and of course caught up with internet work and blogging before taking off for Mongolian steppes!
Day two on the island of Olkhon, where we enjoyed an incredibly scenic hike around Southern part of the island.