Russia through "Ozero Baykal" (Lake Baikal)
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| fennU2 (flickr user) Lake Baikal |
With the sudden interest in the deepest lake in the world, I encountered the following railway systems: Trans-Baikal, Circum-Baikal, and Trans-Siberian. Interesting. It made me curious on how to get there; it is one of the lesser known places in the world. Russia is a fascinating country, and I thought I knew many things about it until I looked closer on the Siberian portion of the country where Lake Baikal is situated. The rest has been like a chain reaction, and things went from Baikal, then to Irkutsk, Krasnoyarsk, Novosibirsk, and then Yekaterinburg, all the way to Moscow. The places sound Greek to me; but err, no, they sound Russian. That happens if you end up tracing the Trans-Siberian railway, the longest continuous railway in the world; and I think that the train ride would be such an adventure, speaking of traveling for almost a week from Vladivostok to Moscow. I would like to share a nice and vivid account of a journey across Russia:
It is such a good read.
Going back to Lake Baikal, I never thought that it is one of the more impressive lakes in terms of sceneries. The lake is part of an active continental rift zone, which will eventually become an oceanic rift if the geologic activity continues. Here are some pics:
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| Vera & Jean-Christophe |
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| Sergei Ozerov |
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| Sergei Ozerov |
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| Tammisto |
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| Jim Linwood |
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| Fedor Stroganov |
Not bad. Really not bad to look at. Spring, Summer, Winter... Winter can be bitter in Siberia though.
