Irkutsk

Finally we entered the Russian Federation, although it took quite a while to enter! We departed from Ulaan Baator at 19h30 and arrived at the Mongolian border town at 4 am, we only noticed when we woke up that we weren't moving anymore, once we got out of the train we were the only cart left, all the other cart were for inner Mongolian travel and the loc had to come from Russia.

After the customs circus we left 10h30 over 6 hours after arriving, only to go for 20 KM to the Russian border town. There we waited for another 4 hours before we finally continued our trip.

In the train we shared our compartment with two other travellers, a Englishman and an Aussie (no talk about cricket though) we were the only four tourist on the train alltogether.

We made a stop of an hour in Ulaan Ude which gave us the chance to visit the largest Lenin head (and statue of a head) in the world. We bought some food and beer in the supermarket and made our dinner in the train.

The next morning we arrived in Irkutsk and left for the Baikal lake straight away. The Baikal lake is the largest in the world, also the deepest and contains the coldest water. It is really beautiful over there and we enjoyed our stay.

Right now we are back in Irkutsk and plan to move on to Ekaterinburg tomorrow (2 day journey). Over there we can walk from Asia into Europe and probably visit the site where the Romanovs were killed.