Lake Baikal - Perfection

Our $3 public bus careens down a ride straddled on both sides by pine, aspen and cedar trees. It is fall and the leaves are changing in a brilliant display of how beautiful nature can be. I’ve hoisted my pack on my lap to make room for a man and his baby. He opts to stand instead, probably fearing the damage my bag might do should it roll off of my lap and into his child.



Andy and Charlotte have joined Matt and I for this part of the adventure - a two-day, one-night stint in Lystvianka alongside Lake Baikal - the world’s largest freshwater lake. The entire thing is drinkable (it tastes delicious) and has enough fresh water to quench the thirst of every person on earth for FORTY YEARS. It is on average 30 miles wide and nearly 400 miles long, surrounded by tiny villages and the largest forest on earth. Called the Taiga, the forest itself is three times the size of the Amazon and LARGER THAN THE CONTINENTAL UNITED STATES. Who knew Russia was so awesome?



After checking into our chalet nestled up on a hill overlooking the lake, the four of us spent the afternoon taking in the splendor and building up for our big swim. The most mesmerizing views came from atop a random ski lift we stumbled upon at the top of the mountain. Orange, read and yellow trees flowed seamlessly into brilliant blue water, ending abruptly at snow-capped mountains lining the opposite shore. It was otherworldly.





By now, evening was fast approaching. Charlotte, Matt and I decided it was time to “man up” (Andy was not so inclined, but offered to video and take photos). Our guide book told us of an ancient myth that swimming in Baikal adds 25 years to your life and hey, who couldn’t do with a few extra annums? We had asked our waitress at lunch where a good swimming spot might be and all she would say is “niet.” Too cold for even the Russians, apparently. Hogwash!



Moseying down to our own spot of choice, we ran into some Russians who had just emerged from the sea. They were enthralled. The three of us ditched our clothes in favor of swimsuits and - on the count of three - waded in together. Having a slight Channel-training advantage, the 9-degree water (47 degrees Fahrenheit) was still intense but not deathly.



A few strokes out I turned to find Matt screaming incessantly while heading to shore. Charlotte was only ankle-deep. “Come on,” I shouted. “25 years!” In the end we all made it in and have both a photo and video to prove our 70-second ordeal actually happened. In fact, on our second day we took a boat cruise on the lake and went swimming again - this time diving right off the boat (I’ll post video when I can).



Post-swim, feeling energized and rejuvenated, we returned to our lunchtime cafe to show the waitress our video. She smile broadly and began to laugh before returning to her more traditional, seriously serious demeanor. Then, mid meal, something happened. She came over to the table, pointed to me and said “Actor? Lost?” She was convinced that I was Matthew Fox! Matt burst into laughter and I said to her in Russian, “sorry, no.” She went back to the bar and spent the remainder of our meal looking over at me and smiling. After we’d paid the bill she produced a camera, pointed to me and said “picture?”



I obliged and just like that, the rumor began to spread through all of Siberia that Matthew Fox went swimming in Lake Baikal. Russia is SO FUNNY!

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Kyle Taylor

Irkutsk - The Russia We See In Propaganda

It’s 6:30am and our Russian train attendant is banging violently on the cabin door screaming incoherently in what we presume to be Russian. We’re arriving in an hour and she is insistent on us waking up NOW. Naturally, needing just to slip on some clothes and strap on our bags, we’d rather doze for another 58 minutes. Sadly, she has a special tool that can unlock our room from the outside. Sneaky Russian.

She not only wants us up, she wants our sheets too and begins tugging at them from underneath us. “Why do you hate me,” I plead. More incoherent rambling. I get up and head to the bathroom as someone else is coming out. She nips in front of me and locks the door so I can’t use it! Mean Russian.

We pull into the station amid gloom and doom. This is the Russia we were always told exists behind the Iron Curtain. Everything is grey - the sky, the buildings, the coats, the shoes, the streets and the busses. We hop down to a smiling attendant wishing us good day - the same attendant who tried to vacuum my feet, wake me up, steal my sheets and keep me from going to the bathroom. Bi-Polar Russian.

We get to the hostel and ring and ring to no avail. I call the manager and he says someone will be there in “twenty - no thirty minutes.” Matt falls asleep in the grey stairwell and I wander aimlessly down dilapidated grey streets around dilapidated grey houses.



Post Check-in Matt is exhausted and decides to sleep. I head out to explore the city, boarding the world’s oldest grey tram car (not officially, but in both look and feel). The bike chain churns the door open and I attempt to buy a ticket (25 cents per ride) then proceed to the nearest seat. A grey-haired woman wearing grey boots and an “official vest” marches up and starts screaming at me in Russian. I have NO IDEA what she is saying. A man walks up holding two tickets. Alas, I forget to pick up my ticket. Rookie mistake in America, gulag-level error in Russia.

He hands her both and she proceeds to mark them with a red stamp (lots of official stamping seems to happen in Russia) and then punch it in this archaic little punch machine that looks like something from a scrap booking toolkit to add “flair” to a photo. This entire time she continues to mumble under her breath. She hands the ticket back to me and then proceeds to point toward the back of the bus and shout. Feeling like the Russian-planted Rosa Parks being chastised for not understanding and for being foreign, I grab the handrail and say indignantly, “niet!”

This enrages her and she launches into a tirade, pointing at signs on the wall, pointing at my face and pointing to the back of the tram. Not wanting her to go all “secret police” on me, I get up and - head hanging low - meander to the back of the tram. She plops down in the chair and I realize that it is - in fact - her official seat. Oops?



I spend the afternoon slightly frightened of most people I run into assuming they either want to beat me up or steal all my money (thank you Hollywood and Washington for indoctrinating me to believe all Russians are evil). Fortunately, as the temperature warms and the skies open up, Irkutsk begins to shine and the grey turns to a rainbow of glistening colors.



The central market is both charming and beautiful, with cans of vegetables, fresh fruit and vodka stacked impossibly high. At the clothes market I find a lovely woman who bargains with me wearing a smile. Each church I come across (and there are many many churches) is more decorative and more charming than the last. In fact, each Russian I come across (and there are many many Russians) is more decorative (impossibly high heels) and more charming than the last.



I return to the hostel with fresh cheese, meat and bread that I bought for $2 to make lunch feeling invigorated and slightly in lust with this city - called the Paris of Russia - and this country. These Russians aren’t so bad after all.

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Kyle Taylor

Stop. Go. No, Stop. No, Go. Wait, where Is The Engine Car?

We are awakened by the older cabin matron who jolts our door open, points to her watch, shouts “passport control” and slams the door shut again. It’s seven thirty. An hour later the train rolls into Mongolian border control and we are boarded by suited officials. Let the waiting game begin.

I run through the day in my head: “okay, so this many hours for this, another x number of hours for that, some time to eat and a decent night’s sleep.” DAY PLANNED!

DAY LOST. For whatever reason all sense of time and space seems to disappear on this epic adventure. We are all convinced this is in part due to the obscene amount of time we spend not moving in a state of perpetual “um, border control? wait, toilet? um, huh, what, where, who...” that really curtails any type of forward progress.

We are re-boarded and our passports are returned to us. I look at my watch. It has been TWO HOURS. The train rolls all of ten feet forward and we are boarded again - this time by Mongolian customs officials. The waiting game begins yet again. Caroline from down the hall stops in to tell us what’s going on. How she found out, I have no idea. “We’re going to be here for a while and you can get off and go to the bathroom. I’m gong to feed that dog over there.” I de-train and use the toilet not because I have to, but because I am bored. In fact, I haven’t needed the bathroom for what seems like days. Friends had told me horror stories of getting trapped at the border for ten and twelve hours with no access to toilets. In anticipation, I cut myself from all fluids an hour before we boarded the train. Maybe dehydration is part to blame for lack of mental prowess.



I re-board and another hour passes before we begin to screech slowly forward yet again. This time we carry on for a good thirty minutes crossing from Mongolia to Russia. We pass the electric fence (yes, electric fence) that runs the length of the border to stop all those pesky Mongolians from fleeing to the frigid, snow-covered, poverty-ridden Siberian side and pull into the Russian passport control and customs station, where we are boarded by at least twenty Russian soldiers that all look exactly like what you’d think a Russian soldier should look like.

They inspect our passports with excessive seriousness then instruct us to “leave cabin.” The four of us get up, unsure of where we’re going. A small gymnastic woman enters our cabin and proceeds to do an uneven bars routine while looking in every nook and cranny for who knows what. Drugs? Money? Mongolians? I de-train, [pretend to] use the bathroom, arrive back to find they’ve moved a bit further down the cabin and return to my flux state-of-being that is both unproductive and uninteresting.



I also notice that we are no longer attached to an engine car, which is just super. FOUR MORE HOURS PASS. The cabin matron has made yet another wardrobe change (she has a different outfit for each activity - collecting trash, punching tickets, doing needlepoint, screaming at me, etc). She is now vacuuming THE ENTIRE TRAIN with a dust buster, even coming into our room. She motions to our feet and points up. We lift and she sweeps under our feet. She then motions to our feet and points down, as if we would have stayed in that formation permanently otherwise.

We are shaken by an abrupt “push” forward as an engine is attached. We start moving ever so slowly forward. Caroline reappears to inform us of the party happening later in the evening. “Apparently there is actually a Russian on the train and he has invited all of us to a Vodka party later.” Everyone enters a “do your own thing” mood for a few hours until we’re reuniting to attend the party.

The four of us - Andy, Charlotte, Matt and I - pick out our outfits and get dressed as if we’re going for a night on the town. Having sat for nearly 36 hours, actually having something to do is rather exciting.

The real-life Russian never shows but sure enough we end up with 3 Aussies, 4 Americans, 2 Brits, 1 Austrian and 1 Belarussian all squeezed into the same cabin. All proceeds well until a few of the attendees decide they want to drink with the Russian Army, who have invited the whole lot of us to the dining car. Valuing my life as well as my unbroken bones, I pass and head to bed. WHAT. A. DAY.

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Kyle Taylor

Caroline, Queen of Siberia

My watch reads 8:23pm as our train pulls into the Ulaanbaatar platform. We’re standing in the blustery cold under nearly 2 inches of snow thanks to a fluke snowstorm that forced the temperature down 35 degrees in twelve hours. Matt is to my right attempting to dodge the sways and dips of a very drunk Mongolian man. To my left is a dapper American fellow named Chris. Chris is a missionary from the Mormon church, which I identify from the universal name tag that all missionaries seem to wear.

He asks me where I’m from which is followed up with: “so, have you heard about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints?” While I award an A for effort all I can think is, “does this really seem like the right moment to pitch the church? I’m wearing a 40-pound backpack on my back and a 20-pound pack on my front standing in two inches of snow on a train platform in Mongolia.” The whistle sounds and I excuse myself, apologizing for needing to hop aboard.



We are joined by Andy and Charlotte in our 4-person, 4-bed, microscopic cabin. It appears that - once again - all the foreigners have been placed in the same coach. We begin to chat our plan our coordinated attack on arranging our berths. “Okay, if you put your right foot here then I can put my left arm there and pull down this bunk. Good. Now, if you suspend your body from that rail I can do a front somersault vaulted twist into my bed. Ready, steady...”

Conversation on travel, work, school and home (they’re both UK residents and London-bound!) shifts abruptly as Caroline bursts into the cabin. We first met Caroline in Beijing, as she and her partner were on our group tour to the Great Wall. They miraculously reappeared on our train to Mongolia, where we brushed shoulders and spoke of our epic adventures. While we stayed in different places in Ulaanbaatar, both of us took overnight trips to the National Park (though we did not see each other). Then, while standing in the snow and chatting with the Mormon missionary, I caught her gaze across the platform.

Caroline seems to know everyone on the train, including the staff, border guards and customs officials. Austrian, she lives in London and “take one major trip every year.” You can hear her bubbly, enthusiastic laugh from six cabins down and whenever she shows up you can be sure there is some new train-wide news or gossip to be disseminated. She is the foreign traveler’s matriarch on our train journey through Siberia and thanks to her precise smoking schedule, I could set my watch by her movements.

She offers us Vodka all around which the four of us politely decline. This is followed by a number of hilarious anecdotes including a profile of her new Mongolian friend, her love of feeding dogs and how she made friends with our on-board cabin matron. The conversation carries on for several more highly entertaining hours before the four of us are sufficiently tired. Matt and Charlotte both accidentally stumble into the matron’s berth whilst looking for the bathroom and get a stern gaze for interrupting a frantically paced session of needlepointing. With that, we drift off to sleep...

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Kyle Taylor

First Class Is Actually Second Class & Other First-Day Musings

We arrived at the station a good hour pre-departure and boarded to find that we were - in fact - two of only four people on the entire car of the train which is meant to sleep forty. In turns out that there are a total of 26 people on the entire 18-car train and we are in fact outnumbered by porters, cooks and conductors. What’s even more hilarious is that all the foreigners are bunched into the back three cars, which the rest of the folks enjoying the others. To top it all off, some Australians we just met are the only four people in their car as well. What makes this amusing is that there are all in THE SAME CABIN and were told that spreading out is “impossible.”

It seems that the food is country-specific, with different food cars being attached at border crossings. Speaking of border crossings, after a day of napping, reading, blogging, staring out the window, movie watching and game playing we were welcomed to the Sino-Mongolian border by an enormous Chinese army brigade marching ominously along the platform to a German symphony blasting from the speakers. We were then invited to “detrain and shop a little” while the wheels were being swapped (while the entire planet runs on the same size tracks, only Mongolia and Russia continue to use a network that is 3.5 inches wider than EVERYWHERE ELSE (naturally). This means the train cars have to have all their wheels swapped out at the border.



Fortunately, there was an extensive selection of “duty free” to explore that included some fabulous options like “Absolute” Vodka, “Jieku Hueihai” Whisky and “John Work Song” Black Strap Whisky. Note the remarkably similar names and labels, despite being roughly 20% of the cost. It was the perfect farewell to China. Well, that and being allowed to roam freely through the customs area despite having our passports confiscated, left to wait aimlessly on the platform for “two to six hours” with knock-off liquor and an enormous group of foreigners.

Moments later at the Mongolian border we were treated to a form written entirely in Mongolian script and told to “fill it out.” Ten minutes later the border agent reappeared and as I was attempting to mime my illiteracy she nabbed the incomplete forms from my hand, stuck then in her pocket, stuck her tongue out and blew. Where, exactly have I taken this train?

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Kyle Taylor

The Really Freaking Great Wall

Last time I scaled The Real Freaking Great Wall was three years ago with my Aunt Robin. It was mid-February, which meant no tourists due to the usually cold weather. Thanks to a fluke heat wave we had temperatures in the mid 60s and I scaled the Mutiyanu region of the wall in jeans and a T-shirt sans crowds of Chinese pilgrims enjoying the circus environment of ski lifts and toboggan runs that carried you to and from The Wall.


This time around, it was going to be sunny, hot and possibly more hectic. Wanting to step even further off the beaten path, I convinced my travel companions to opt for the “adventure hike” from Jinshaling area to Simatai area. At just over 6 miles it seemed like a reasonable day-long adventure. Thanks to insane traffic in Beijing, our 70-mile bus journey ended at our starting point just before 10:30am after four hours in a bus full of foreign tourists and our “English Guide” (who did very little guiding). We hopped off post-naps, post-iPod sessions and post-sunscreen spreading prepped for the big hike ahead.


We clipped on our matching “Happy Travel” group tour name tags (sweet) and hopped the cable car to the top. Having been before I thought this time around would be more of a “yeah, isn’t it awesome? indeed” type of experience. Turns out the darn thing is completely and utterly breathtaking every time you go, leading to more of a “WOW, I MEAN, HOW INCREDIBlE IS THIS? I KNOW! TOTALLY AMAZING” reaction.


I could go on and on but suffice to say, it was incredible. Unlike Mutiyanu or Badaling (the Chinese equivalent of Disneyland) this section of The Wall is both partially restored and partially in ruins, giving some incredible perspective to both the scale and intensity of the structure itself. At points we were crawling on our hands and knees down perilous slopes, wondering how they built the darn thing in the first place. By mile six our legs were shaking from the near constant up and down, around and about, inside and outside hike, making the zip line run back to the ground a fantastic (albeit kitsch) end to an incredible day. Of everything I’ve seen in these wild 25 years, this is no doubt THE highlight. Visit The Really Freaking Great Wall if it’s the only thing you do.





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Kyle Taylor