May 3

When I awoke this morning my head was full of vodka-sand – the toasting here in Baikal is killing me. I’d slept alongside the housecat Marquisa, who had initially selected Max as a companion before being politely informed of her cat allergy. The previous night I’d lost at darts to our host Valodya in a first-to-501, best of three contest, after eating his two Baikal fish delicacies – one steamed fish layered with olives, chilli and cheese, the other raw Baikal fish seasoned with onion. We were informed that the latter was only acceptable because of the unusually clean water here.

We were up early because that’s when the ice fishing is best. Over a typically hearty breakfast of creamed rice, pickle, cheese and sausage Valodya told us a tall story about his dog, Bricht, barking at a bear the night before. At least, I assumed he was having us on.

After eating we got into the “special warm clothes” that Aleksandr had insisted upon so vehemently back in Ust-Barguzin the day before – thermal leggings, extra jackets, and our warmest hats and gloves. We were also loaned ice-proof boots, and I was given some particularly impressive knee-high ice fishing boots with a thick inner sock.

Walking down from the guesthouse, we met the snowmobile driver on the shoreline, each picking a different spot on the fragile icy shore to step gingerly to the tougher ice further out, as hairline cracks appeared under our feet. The snowmobile had been parked about fifty metres out from shore, and had a caravan of two sleds attached to the back of it. Within a couple of minutes we were off, faced resolutely backward to avoid the worst of the biting cold wind on our faces. Bricht, who had followed us down, trailed us hopefully for some distance until Aleksandr finally convinced him that this trip wasn’t for him.

Max and I had no real idea where we were going, or how long it would take. As we sledded along we were occasionally crossing worrying cracks in the ice, where spring waters had begun to thaw, carving deep rivulets six or eight inches wide into the white surface. After passing one such that was even wider, perhaps a foot and a half, a halt was called and Aleksandr and the driver debated for some minutes whether to continue. Evidently as spring advances conditions are getting perilous for sledding and driving on the ice.

It would be hard to overstate the alien beauty of this place to us – we were skating along on a giant white expanse, with no end before the horizon in one direction. The whole of this lake, which is more than easily visible from space, perhaps a hundred kilometres east-west and several hundred north-south, is frozen solid. It is ringed by rocky cliffs, green forests, golden river plains and snow-capped peaks. The whole is something like the ur-landscape of the fantasy novel, in fact I am constantly reminded, nerdishly, of Robert E. Howard’s Hyperborea. Not to mention that all of Baikal teems with wildlife – otters, squirrels, umpteen varieties of bird including cranes, herons, eagles, crows, wrens, gulls, ducks … and deer, seals, bears, cows. It is an utterly, utterly magical place. It’s not hard to understand how every civilization to come into contact with it has held it in reverence.

Eventually Sacha’s debate with the driver ended positively, we moved on, and in a few minutes had reached a crazy ice fishing shanty town, where fishermen had bivouacked on the ice for days catching fish through holes drilled in its surface. Amongst the tents, antique generators and sleds, the place was a mess of dead and dying fish, with thirty or so men standing or sitting around gently tickling lines dropped through the ice. Every so often there’d be a burst of activity as someone hooked one, and began hauling up his sixteen or seventeen metres of fishing wire.

We wandered around inspecting the proceedings for a few minutes. Most of the fish being caught were small – less than half a kilogram probably – but there had been one “sik” of two or three kilos caught that morning. Perhaps over a hundred of the smaller variety. Aleksandr grabbed a guy he knew, who we heard had been out living on the ice for the past seventeen days, to borrow a line. Soon I was dangling it through an abandoned ice-hole. The trick was to gently raise and lower the bait in a rhythmic manner, and wait for some action. As a consequence all the men were gesturing spasmodically with their reels, as if the whole place were some sort of prayer camp.

The Baikal uniform is the camouflage fishing suit, with big black boots, and that’s what almost all these ice fishers were wearing. You could also see the odd guy dressed like James Dean on ice, with aviator sunglasses and a giant furry deerstalker.

It only took me a couple of minutes to hook one – although admittedly I took plenty of advice from Sacha on technique — and as I did five or six of the guys near me also got lucky, leading me to speculate that perhaps the fish were moving around in large groups beneath our feet. Pulling up my line very inexpertly, a very decent-sized catch emerged, which flipped around for minutes afterward, disturbing Max a bit and reminding me of the closing scenes of the clip to “Epic” by Faith No More.

Fish having been caught, it was time to continue. We had been snowmobiling in the zaliv between the Sacred Nose peninsula and the eastern shore of Baikal, and now it was time to go out on the open lake in search of the nerpa, the world’s only freshwater seal. The wind bit harder out on the open ice, and the nerpa were not where Aleksandr and the driver originally expected them to be. More debates occurred and we pressed on for a time, stopping intermittently for Aleksandr to scan the surroundings with his tripod-mounted field telescope.

At one such stop we drank a very peculiar Siberian cocktail to warm ourselves up – chilli and honey flavoured vodka mixed with hot black tea and sugar. I thought it was excellent, but Max wasn’t keen, so I ended up with two of these drinks. Given the disorienting conditions I now felt more than slightly tipsy, but I was really enjoying myself and also felt significantly warmer!

Finally Aleksandr spotted some tiny black blobs in the far distance, perhaps one or two kilometres away. These were the seals, encamped next to a hole out in the middle of the ice. We couldn’t approach in the snowmobile because they would dive, so Alina, Max and I began a long march across the ice to see how close we could get to these tiny black specks. Unfortunately, after five minutes of walking they disappeared from view, either having moved on, or having somehow observed us and become alarmed.

Despite some more searching we weren’t to have better luck with the seals, not that it bothered us. It was somehow enough just to know they were there, what with how entranced we were merely by being out on the ice like this.

We returned by snowmobile from the open ice-lake past several smaller bays, including one whose promontory was shaped very much like a razorbacked wild boar. On the way we stopped at a beach where the ice was thawing more rapidly than in other places due to the presence of two hot springs on the shoreline. Getting out to investigate a little further round, we found the springs done up as wooden baths, the water in them very hot and quite temperate respectively. The hotter of the two gave off a strong smell of hydrogen sulphide and had some sort of noxious greenery growing on the bath-seat, so we declined to get into it, but we dipped our legs in the other up to the knee.

Where the ice had thawed here we got a very slight glimpse of the famed clarity of Baikal’s water, which is due to the presence of millions of tiny crustacea that filter algae from the lake. At a depth of a metre or two, it was still easy to see tiny details and blemishes on the smoothed lake rocks that lined the shore.

For the return leg to Mokharava (where Valodya’s guesthouse was) Sacha suggested Max and I try the un-walled rear sled of the snowmobile, which we promptly hopped onto. It was far more comfortable than the more secure central sled owing to the increased knee-room, but we were rather too complacent! At one point the snowmobile driver pulled a vicious chicane to hit the sweet spot of a wide ice-crack and both of us very nearly fell off the vehicle, me to the left and Max to the right. After that, and with much thumbs-ups and embarrassed looks at Sacha, we were both a damn sight more careful.

On the way we ran across some fishermen illegally bringing up a net that had frozen solid for two months, and assessing which of the fish they’d trapped were still good enough to eat. The bad pile was probably some three times the size of the good, in which several of the fish were still feebly alive. Aleksandr went into park ranger mode and confiscated many of the fish as a penalty, storing them on the snowmobile. When we arrived back at Mokharava the spring ice had deteriorated still further. It seems to melt a little during the day and re-freeze at night as the season gets older, making the surface unreliable. The snowmobile was parked further out than in the morning and as Aleksandr and the driver entered another debate – part of which no doubt concerned how much longer the vehicle could still be used – Max, Arlina and I were left to fend for ourselves as far as getting to shore was concerned.

As we stepped with care on the stronger looking patches of ice, we occasionally broke through six inches or so to the next layer, and this happened more and more as we neared the shore. It was quite unnerving, although the waterproof boots helped and I think we were only in a few feet of water. By the time we reached the edge, I was crashing through with every ungainly step.

We were surprisingly exhausted by our ice adventures, although it was only around one o’clock in the afternoon. We were also both a little burnt by the wind and sun. After a brief dawdle along the beach we returned for yet another monster lunch – to put it in perspective, every meal here is probably twice the size that I’d have at any given meal of an ordinary day back home. Shortly thereafter we said our farewells to Valodya and were back in the car returning to Ust-Barguzin.

That evening we dined on the fish that Sacha had conveniently confiscated, cleaned one by one on the massive log table at the back of his expansive backyard, then salted and grilled on sticks over a campfire. The fish was very tasty, if riddled with bones, and there were a few jokes made at Max’s expense owing to her perceived dislike of the meat, a bit unfair given the only thing she’d actually refused was Valodya’s somewhat intimidating raw fish dish. Back inside we were treated to the burning first distillation of Sacha’s mother’s milk vodka, and then the totally scary firewater that was its second distillation. Must’ve been about sixty percent ethanol, and I was moderately proud of my ability to down a small shot without blinking.