Known for extreme temperatures, remoteness and Soviet-era labor camps, just the idea of Siberia often conjures up images of hardship. The vast region occupies 75 percent of Russia’s territory but only a quarter of its population, meaning only the hardiest of characters—at one point, two exiles for every local, but nowadays anyone involved in mining, oil, logging or coal—bother to deal with a place where winter lasts a good portion of the year.
Despite all this, I’ve always wanted to visit, probably because Siberia is so close (only 3.5 kilometers at one point) to Alaska, where I grew up. Alaska’s past history as a Russian territory isn’t so obvious in Anchorage (though we lived on a street called Glazanof Drive), but many Alaskan road trips reveal onion-topped Russian orthodox churches, overgrown cemetaries and other vestiges of the state's brief stint as a Russian colony. (Once beavers were hunted almost to the point of extinction, the cash-strapped tsar sold the land to the Americans at a firesale rate).
Log cabin in Listvyanka
As we cross Siberia by train, it becomes clear that Alaska and Russia have more than just wildlife in common. The landscapes looked remarkably similar, with silver birch forests and Siberian pines stretching into the horizon. Little houses are made of wood, the region's most plentiful building material, but with ornate, and brightly-painted, window frames. Both regions enjoyed gold rushes back in the day, and are still involved in similar industries; we’ve passed growing numbers of cargo trains stacked high with logs and rusty oil tanks, some of which look like they’ve been around since rail travel’s earliest days.
Trans-Siberian cargo
Five days after leaving Moscow, we arrived in Listvyanka, a Russian resort town hugging the edge of a huge freshwater lake. Lake Baikal is the world’s oldest, largest, deepest freshwater lake bigger than all of the Great Lakes combined. According to experts, its just a matter of time before this remarkably clear body of water — you can see straight through to the pebbles at the bottom — becomes the world’s fifth largest ocean as shifting tectonic plates continue to shape the Asian continent.
The crystal clear (and allegedly drinkable) waters of Lake Baikal
We spent the first day hiking around with Sasha, a retired PE teacher who blazed many of the trails in this cliffside forest. Tom and I don’t usually travel with a guide, but we were really happy to have one in this case: Sasha pointed out all the local trees and herbs, including Siberian pine, wild garlic and plants that relive vodka hangovers, then treated us to a lakeside picnic of sausage, homemade pastries and vegetables from his sister’s garden.
Lake Baikal from the trail
Other than hiking around— which is really all you want to do after five days on a train — the other big thing to do here is try omul, a local fish found only in Lake Baikal. This will be easy enough to do: the trout/salmon cross is served grilled, baked or fried on all local menus, smoked in market stalls and hawked from most station platforms as you get closer to Baikal by train. Tom and I tried ours at Proshly Vet, a fishing-themed restaurant with a boat for a bar while we watched the sun dip over the lake in a perfect sunset. Apparently, we were very lucky with the weather. Another guide told us that Siberia’s fall — which is currently brisk, but clear — lasts for only a few weeks; in a couple more days, she said, this area will be freezing cold. Tourism will drop off now until the Christmas holidays, when Russians get a ten day break and visit the lake — which still manages to freeze, despite its massive size — for winter sports, including snowmobiling and dog sledding.
Lake Baikal: Bigger than America's five Great Lakes combined
We spent our third day in Irkutsk, a Siberian frontier town founded by merchants who made their fortune trading furs, gems and gold. A few hundred years later, the border town was also filled with disgraced officers — nicknamed The Decembrists— exiled from St. Petersburg to Siberia for their role in a failed coup. That they were confined to serve out their sentences in these elaborate manor houses really says something about the opulent lifestyle of Russia’s nobility. Regardless, these officers and their families — all of whom came from Russia’s educated upper classes — made the most of their time up north: founding schools, art classes and other events that also benefitted the local community. It was the exact opposite of “brain drain,” when aspiring folks might leave small towns in search of opportunities in the big city or overseas. Three hundred and fifty years later, Irkutsk is a bustling college town with some of Siberia’s best schools.
Siberian style
After a quick city tour with Katerina, who was studying at one of the city’s six colleges, we headed off to find the gravestone of Grigory Shelekov, the Russian explorer who founded Russia’s first colony in Alaska. Shelekov was quite the man around town, and Russian’s were quite proud of their colony, hence the great flourish of his unmissable tombstone behind Znamensky Monastery. Fortunately, this beautiful space managed to escape destruction during Soviet times.
Inside Znamensky Monastery
Katerina didn’t seem to think much about Russia’s former Bolshevik leaders, many of whom are immortalized as statues and street names around the city. “I would put a fountain here, not this old man,” she frowned, looking at exaggerated bust of Lenin overlooking one of the city squares. “The Soviet years are over.” Still, it looks less like the old guards will be completely erased — Red soldiers are immortalized in a stain-glassed window inside the old explorer’s club, while Stalin’s mug glowers down from atop the Trans-Siberian Railway headquarters — but simply folded into this frontier towns’ eclectic story. These days, Karl Marx and Lenin Streets boast fancy restaurants, cinemas and coffee shops, including this one below, which looks very similar to a Starbucks logo.
Starbucks...erm, Lenin Street Coffee, Irkutsk
Today, Irkutsk is showing her age: the roads are a mess, and some of the quirky wood cabins are sinking into the ground. Still, the town has a lively, frontier feeling, maybe because anything goes when you’re thousands of miles from the capital city. That pioneering spirit is also similar to Alaska, another place where residents consider themselves apart — both physically and culturally — from softer folks living in the big city.
Jen Swanson