11, 12, 13 July 2009 Lake Baikal to Ulan-Ude, Siberia

July 11: I got up and shook off the rain from my tent fly. It had rained a couple of hours during the night. Much to my surprise, the day was bright and sunshiny. While I was packing up I was visited by two more vehicles. Again they were looking for Lake Baikal. After I packed up I rode to Highway M55 and then towards Ulan-Ude. As I was riding I kept looking for access to the lake. I tried several times and the roads usually dead-ended in the railroad tracks or a small village. In one particular instance, the road dead-ended into the railroad tracks but also ended alongside of a mountain stream. Three vehicles were parked there, and the people were having a picnic or sunning themselves. One of the older women heard me driving up, turned and saw me. She spun on her heel and took off on a fun run to her vehicle/van, slammed all the doors shut and locked the van tight. I bet she breathed a sigh of relief when the last door slammed shut and she heard the doors lock. I made a u-turn and left. The railroad tracks basically follow the shoreline of the lake all the way to Ulan-Ude. On one of the attempts I actually was able to walk down to Lake Baikal. It looked very much like Lake Superior in Northern Minnesota, Wisconsin and Upper Michigan. The weather is affected by the lake as is the temperature just like the Great Lakes in the U.S. While I was standing on the shore I saw two men cleaning up after fishing. I asked them to take a picture of me with the lake in the background which they gladly did. When they found out I was an American they invited me in to eat boiled fish they just caught. The son-in-law gave me a tour of the house which he said was 150 years old. No one lived in this house because it was in disrepair. It was a small house which was just one room. It had two single beds, a furnace, electricity and provisions to cook. I don’t believe it was as large as the wood shed on our family farm back in Wisconsin. This place was more like a rustic lake cabin you find all over Northern Minnesota and Wisconsin. It wasn’t long before the father-in-law was digging thru a plastic box full of fish pulling out the best looking and largest fish. Guess what happened next? I was handed a knife and a cleaning board, and asked to help clean these fish. I thought, “oh crap I have my riding clothes on and I don’t want them to smell like fish.” I also haven’t cleaned a fish since I was a kid when we cleaned smelt from Lake Superior. I watched how the father-in-law scaled the first fish and then he handed me a fish work on. I put the cleaning board on my lap and proceeded to remove scales from the fish and the father-in-law finished cleaning the fish. We kind of had an assembly line going on. We talked as best we could while all this was going on. I used my electronic language translator to help with our communication difficulties. Now get this…..my English Lingo translator has 580,000 words it and there’s not one word in it to translate machinist to Russian. I was disappointed with it again. I wanted to dropkick the thing into the ditch. The cleaned fish were rinsed in Lake Baikal. I washed all the fish scales off my hands in the lake. The water in this lake is crystal clear and can be drank without any purification. The fish were put in a pot and boiled for 5 to 10 minutes. After that we ate them as finger food with tea and bread. The meat fell away from the bones as we picked away at them. I ate three fish and everyone else ate whatever their fill was. I got the feeling they were on some type of time schedule because they started loading up their stuff and needed to get back to the city. The son-in-law said he was 23 years old and the father-in-law either was around 50. The son-in-law, Alex, said, he was married and his wife and he were expecting their first child. He was excited about this. Alex disappeared for about five minutes and came back with two ten ruble coins which I had never seen before. I’ve seen one, two, and five ruble coins but never a ten. They asked me if I had any American coins. I told them no but pulled out a one dollar bill. They would have preferred coins but accepted the one dollar bill. They asked me to write my name on it, where I lived and the date. I also gave them my card with my blog address on it. Alex gave me his e-mail address. They took pictures of me with them and my motorcycle. I departed and was back on Highway M55 to Ulan-Ude. I still kind of wanted to camp on Lake Baikal if I found another entrance to lake. I may have driven 30 or 40 miles when I saw what looked like a sign to the lake. I made a left turn and started driving toward the lake not knowing whether it was going to a town or the lake. It was a gravel road full of potholes, and you couldn’t drive more than 20 mph/30 kph. The road led to the railroad track, then under the railroad track, then into the village and eventually to a road that parallels the shoreline. As I drove along the shoreline there was free primitive camping, paid or private camping, expensive camping cabins, semi-expensive hotels and then more free primitive camping. I found a spot that didn’t look like it was occupied and stopped and looked around a bit. A young woman came over to where I was standing and spoke to me in Russian. I had no clue what she was saying. I kind of gathered she didn’t want me to camp there. While she was speaking to me a drunken guy threw a fit of rage and started hollering at the top of his lungs. Just that fact alone made me disinterested in camping there. I continued down the road and found an area more suitable to my likes. I probably had driven seven to ten kms up to this point. The road was quite horrible. The farther I drove, the deeper the potholes got. I would guess the deeper potholes were probably 1 ½ feet/46 cms deep. I got a lot of strange looks and found a spot that would work for me. I asked if anyone would care if I put up a tent and no one seemed to care. A few minutes later a guy about 50 years old came over and started talking to me. He smelled of beer and his wife hollered at him to leave me alone and get back over by her. He shook my hand and left. After I told the guy I didn’t understand, everybody knew I was a foreigner. They thought I was probably English. I set up my tent and worked on Matilda for a while. I ate some food I carried with me. The next door guys invited me over for food and vodka. I declined. I walked down by the shore only to find the beach hardly seven yds/meters long and two yds/meters deep. There was no place to walk. Through the evening I was invited to eat with and drink with four different groups of people. By the end of the night I think I was labeled a snob. I was even brought food. I really felt crappy about this but I thought strings were attached so I didn’t accept any invitations. Another thing I didn’t care for was all the talk of vodka. It has been my experience that when you combine drinking and two rivals like the U.S.A. and Russia that it is a breeding ground for old hatreds to surface. It doesn’t take much and all niceties walk out the door. The next thing you have is a public relations problem which I don’t want to deal with. Eventually I drank some tea with the guys next door and a very loud speaking Russian woman brought me a cucumber, meat and some bread and told me to eat it, no questions asked. One of the guys next door called up a friend who spoke some English and they asked me all kinds of questions. One was how old am I. When I told them I was 57 years old something happened. It was like I probably was the oldest person in the campground and my audience left. I grabbed my computer and disappeared into my tent and worked on my blog. I stopped working on that before the monitor light could be seen thru the tent. I didn’t want anyone to know I was carrying a laptop computer with me. Just a little security precaution I was taking tonight. For the most part everybody was really friendly and non-threatening. It was the communication problem. I can tell you, “I don’t understand Russian” wears out real fast after you say it ten times. These people just wanted to know more about me and America, and I couldn’t tell them a thing. It’s frustrating to me when I couldn’t answer their questions.

July 12: I got up about 9:00 a.m. and about 50 per cent of the people had left the campground. I tore down my tent, loaded my bike, gave the next door guys a card to my blog and departed. I got to drive the horrible road back to Highway M55, oil my chain and drive to Ulan-Ude. I drove into the into the city and decided it’s time to stop, pull out the name of the hotel and address and see if I can figured how to find this hotel. Two boys went walking by me, about 11 and 13 years old. I asked them if they knew where the Ayan Hotel was. They drew a small map which said I had to cross two bridges and kind of keep right. I asked them about how far it was and they said about six miles or ten kilometers. Another truck pulled up alongside me and told me about the same thing. So the boys knew what they were talking about. I got back into traffic and started following the directions I had. I crossed both bridges and kept right on the major streets. I crossed another bridge and a little scooter pulled up alongside me and indicated he liked my motorcycle. I motioned for him to pull over and he did. I asked him if he knew where Ayan Hotel was. He looked at the address and said he didn’t. He then called his parents and asked them if they knew where the hotel was. They never heard of it. This young guy was about 15 years old and spoke some English which was helpful. I thanked him and he disappeared into traffic. I pulled back into traffic and went about a quarter mile/500 meters when I saw Voelker the German guy on his Honda 750 African Twin. I last saw him in the large city of Novoibirsk, west of my present location. He was a sight for sore eyes. He hooked a u-turn and pulled up alongside me and motioned for me to pull over. We shook hands and greeted each other with smiles. I asked him if he had a hotel and he said yes. I asked him the name and he said the Ayan Hotel. I checked the name of the hotel I was looking for and it was the same hotel. What luck! I asked how far and he said ¼ mile/500 meters. Unbelievable……that’s even better! We pulled into the Ayan Hotel and talked some, he left on his business and I checked into the hotel. My room is on the fifth floor and this hotel has no elevator. Oh joy, this is going to be a hike with all this baggage. The receptionist said the security man can help with my luggage. I grabbed one bag and he the other, and up the stairs we went. By the time we got to the fifth floor we were huffing and puffing. I tipped him for his help. I had a few more small things to bring up and then I put my bike in a secure parking garage. I went back to my room, flopped on the bed and watched television for a while. I plugged in my laptop and cell phone to charge up the batteries which had run down during my bush camping. The next thing I hear is Voelker knocking on my door. We talked some and then I ask him some questions about Matilda. I thought maybe he had a way of finding the location of hotels on the internet and then finding the Hotel on the GPS map in Matilda. I couldn’t be that lucky. The Garmin world map I’m using in my GPS doesn’t have city maps with names of streets so the addresses within the cities can’t be found. Bummer, that was wishful thinking. So ended another day.

July 13: I got up showered, ate two breakfasts and checked my e-mails. I got an e-mail from Linda, my travel agent, about shipping my motorcycle to Alaska. It wasn’t very pleasant news but I tried to work out a scenario that would work for me so I could accomplish my goals. While I was typing the e-mail to her I heard some Americans talking outside the computer room window. I opened the window and we probably talked for close to 30 minutes while they were waiting for their transportation. The husband and wife were from Texas and the other two women were from New Jersey. A foreign exchange student stayed with the husband and wife the last school year in Texas and invited them to Ulan-Ude. Then they were planning on visiting Lake Baikal, staying several days at the student’s home, then taking the Trans-Siberian Railroad to Moscow in Western Russia. They were suffering from a little culture shock and a few other oddities that we Americans are not used to, such as having no toilet paper, outdoor toilets that smell to high heavens with only a hole in the floor to squat over, and potty stops on the side of the road out in the forest while the mosquitoes are biting your behind. Their ride showed up and I got back to my e-mail, then went back to the room to work on my blog. Sometime around 7:00 p.m. Voelker knocked on my door and asked me to come down to room where they serve the continental breakfast. He said a group of motorcycle riders just arrived at the hotel and were sitting around having a beer and I was welcome to join them. I stopped working on my blog and went down there to visit with them. They included Otto, a Swiss guy with a Honda 750 African Twin, Marko, a German guy riding a Yamaha XT 600 who was living and working in Ireland, a German couple Ulle and Martina riding an older BMW R60/7, and Voelker the German guy I met in Novosibirsk. We all talked up a storm and spoke of our traveling experiences till someone had the idea to go out and get something to eat. We walked out the front door of the hotel to the next door restaurant. We seated ourselves and everyone ordered a beer. Then everyone ordered whatever they could read off the menu. Otto spoke and read the best Russian of the group. He ordered my dinner. I didn’t know for sure what I was eating. I just ate what arrived. More stories were told and more beer was drunk. Martina was the first to excuse herself to go to the room for the night. Beer drinking and stories moved outside the restaurant, then to the hotel lobby and about midnight everyone went to bed. The last word was breakfast at 9:30 a.m. I went to my room and continued working on my blog till about 3:00 a.m. Then I went downstairs to e-mail my blog updates to Mary. I got on the internet and tried e-mailing the blog updates. No luck with being able to compose an e-mail, and I can’t open any e-mails. Oh boy, I hope this problem doesn’t persist. I went back upstairs and went to bed ticked off at 4AM.