Tony_Balony
Joined: 12 Apr 2007
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 Posted: Sun Jul 08, 2007 5:03 am Post subject: NY Times article about Lake Baikal |
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Explorer | Lake Baikal, Russia
A Place of Wonder and Water (a Lot of Water)
Steven Lee Myers/The New York Times
The Burmeister, an old Volga River gunboat, has a shallow draft that allows it to discharge passengers directly on the shore to explore bays, lagoons and rivers on foot.
By STEVEN LEE MYERS
Published: July 8, 2007
THE old Soviet ambulance lurched along a dirt road that would have been impassable to most vehicles. It carried us down from the heights of Olkhon Island’s northernmost cape — a site called Three Brothers that is sacred to two faiths practiced here, Buddhism and Shamanism — and finally into a grassy valley that led to the edge of the world’s deepest, most voluminous body of fresh water, Lake Baikal in Siberia.
Shaman’s Rock, an outcropping near the village of Khuzhir on Olkhon Island, is considered one of the holiest places in Asia.
On the stony shore where we jerked to a halt, there was only a meteorological station and some campers. Then we spotted the Burmeister, a battered old Volga River gunboat sitting in a small bay. For the next six days, it would provide our room and board and our own private transportation to parts of the lake that can be reached only by water.
The boat nosed ashore near a narrow outcropping; we climbed over the rocks and up a wooden plank ladder, and headed out on a glorious summer day.
Baikal (pronounced buy-KAL) is one of Russia’s natural wonders, a crescent moon setting in the vast forest of southern Siberia. Nearly 400 miles long and 50 miles wide at its broadest, the lake is a chasm just over a mile deep, formed by a crack in the earth’s crust. It holds 20 percent of the world’s unfrozen fresh water. Despite a long history of Soviet and Russian environmental indifference in the region, the lake is almost entirely unspoiled — perhaps nearly as unspoiled as it was back in 1890, when Anton Chekhov visited and marveled at the clarity of the water: “People say that in the deepest places you can see down almost as far as a mile, and indeed I myself saw rocks and mountains drowning in the turquoise water that sent shivers down my spine.”
Baikal’s geography, its flora and its fauna are so unusual that Unesco made it a World Heritage Site in 1996, a designation it shares with the Gal�pagos Islands. Unesco’s citation referred to the lake as the “Gal�pagos of Russia.”
Although seemingly remote in faraway, forbidding Siberia, Lake Baikal has long been fairly accessible, especially in the south, when it was a Soviet tourist stop even in the days of restricted travel. These days, its shore is a short day trip along the Angara River from the regional capital Irkutsk, which has daily flights to and from Moscow. The Trans-Siberian Railroad wraps around its southern tip, as does a road with beautiful vistas from points along its mountainous shoreline.
Even Olkhon, the largest of the lake’s islands, roughly in the midsection, is accessible by car or bus from Irkutsk, in summer by a short ferry ride (in winter, one can drive over the ice). We spent only a day on Olkhon, though, seeing some of its spiritual sites, most importantly the Shaman’s, or Burkhan’s, Rock, a twin-peaked outcropping near the village of Khuzhir that is considered one of the holiest places in Asia. Instead we — my wife, Margaret, and our two daughters — had decided to see Baikal the way any body of water is best experienced: from its surface.
Several tourist companies in Irkutsk and, to a lesser extent, in Buryatiya, the region on the eastern side, offer boat tours on Baikal, ranging from day cruises to circumnavigations of the entire lake that can last two weeks. We chose Baikal Explorer, based in Irkutsk, which is run by Leonid Batorov, a pleasant, English-speaking native of Siberia, who explained that he had never left the region, even to visit Moscow. He has an abiding appreciation of the lake, its lore and its fish, which we proceeded to catch shortly after we boarded the boat and met its crew of four, captained by Sergei Burmeister, the nephew of the boat’s owner, Aleksandr, a filmmaker and free spirit, who named it after his father.
In Russia, Baikal is famous for its omul, a small whitefish that is sold, usually smoked, from stands along the lake’s populated stretches. Omul are caught using nets and deep lines, so we fished instead for kharius, or grayling, which live near the shore and at the mouths of the more than 300 rivers and streams that flow into Baikal. Having nosed the Burmeister to the bottom of Olkhon’s eastern cliffs, rising hundreds of feet above the lake, Sergei idled the boat’s engines and let its propellers churn a prop wash that lured in the fish, which we pulled out of the water one after the other.
We did this whenever the mood struck us, which was often. We ate the fish either baked onboard by the crew’s cook, Yulia, roasted on open fires we built on the shore or simply salted and pressed in a pan overnight according to a recipe belonging to Sergei’s grandfather.
The Burmeister is a Yaroslavets-class boat, the most common on Lake Baikal because its durability and low draft, which allows it, effectively, to run aground to discharge passengers on the lake’s shore. This proved essential, since for the bulk of our trip we explored vast unspoiled stretches of lake and shore — with bays, lagoons and rivers at the foot of mountains that reached 7,200 feet.
It is not inexpensive. Leonid said that this year the cost to hire the Burmeister had risen to 30,000 rubles a day, or about $1,140 at 26.3 rubles to the dollar. The Burmeister, though, can comfortably sleep eight guests, making it no more expensive per person than a hotel in many places.
And there’s no hotel in the world where you can wake up, moored in the Ushkany Archipelago, four islands on the eastern shore called the Holy Nose, like something out of Gogol. The islands, part of a nature preserve, are home to Baikal’s nerpas, one of the world’s few populations of freshwater seals.
Their heads bobbed noiselessly in the water, as we drove to one of the smaller islands, Long Island, where we debarked and hiked a forest trail to a series of blinds that allow you to approach their rocky resting places without too much disturbance. There were scores of them, lying in the sun like bathers on an overcrowded Mediterranean beach. The slightest sound sent them tumbling back in the water. We managed to crawl to a ledge within a dozen feet of the closest one, who watched us warily with his wet eyes, as black as onyx.
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http://travel.nytimes.com/2007/07/08/travel/08explorer.html?pagewanted=2&8dpc
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