Exploring Olkhon Island

Our van was not a van; it moved like a carriage on a roller coaster. It lunged over rocks, jolted on its wheels and rolled left and right. Neither was the road a road; it was a bumpy dirt track marked with potholes and canals left by the tyres of vans long past.

Alexei our driver looked at us in his rear-view mirror and laughed. "Little bit bumpy. Everybody okay, yes?"

The plump young man sitting across me, whose face had turned grey ten minutes into the ride, was now green. Finally he choked, lurched and threw up, his vomit splattering all over his shoes. No, everybody not okay.

We were in Russia, on Olkhon Island, in a 20-year-old Soviet-era van that creaked with every movement- not exactly the most comfortable of rides. It was my first day on what is the largest island in Lake Baikal. I had imagined seeing a lot of things on this trip, but the sight of someone throwing up his breakfast wasn’t one of them.

To get to Olkhon Island, I had to take a minibus from a city called Irkutsk the day before. Two days before that, I had arrived by train from Moscow.

I was the only foreigner onboard the minibus, thrown in with a family with three noisy children and a group of four men in their mid-30s.

After a short ferry ride on Lake Baikal, the minibus dropped us off at Khuzhir, a village regarded as the capital of Olkhon Island only because it has the most number of buildings on the island.

Apart from a few shops, a school and some guesthouses, there didn’t seem to be much in Khuzhir, but then nobody takes a ferry to Olkhon Island to visit the village. The countryside and the gorgeous views of Lake Baikal are what draw visitors to the island.

It is impossible to talk about Lake Baikal without quoting a string of statistics and figures. Shaped like a banana, the lake measures 636km from north to south- just 100 km shorter than Peninsula Malaysia.

Lake Baikal is the world's oldest lake, formed almost 50 million years ago. It is also the world's deepest freshwater lake with a depth of 1,637m and because of that, it contains one-fifths of the world's fresh water- more than the entire volume of North America's five Great Lakes combined.

The most impressive thing I read about Lake Baikal is that should the rest of the world's drinking water supply run out at any time, the lake will be able to provide enough water to the Earth's entire population for the next 40 years.

Lake Baikal’s beautiful, crystal-clear water has earned it the nickname the ‘Pearl of Siberia’. I visited Russia in autumn and while it was chilly at times, Siberia at that time of the year isn’t how many outsiders imagine it to be- silent, frozen and covered in snow. Siberia is gorgeous in the autumn, with clear blue skies and trees in a multitude of shades.

The best way to explore Olkhon Island is to go on an organised excursion. I stayed at a guesthouse called Nikita’s Homestead, from which you can book trips and rent bikes if you wish.

There are no tarred roads in all of Olkhon Island, and the drive around the island was the bumpiest I had ever been on. Our first stop was Peschanka Bay, which has a rather dark history- it used to be a gulag or labour camp for political prisoners after the Second World War.

The sand dunes at Peschanka Bay and the empty buildings are now just a reminder of the facility where the prisoners once worked.

The highlight of any excursion around the island is to drive to Cape Khoboi, the northernmost tip of the island. Cape Khoboi is a sacred to the Buryats, the largest indigenous group in Siberia. The Buryats are followers of shamanism, and their core belief is that natural creations such as rivers and trees are blessed with their own souls. Trees on Cape Khoboi are decorated with prayer ribbons, marking the tree’s religious significance to the Buryats.

I left Olkhon Island two days later-too early, as far as I was concerned but I had another train to catch from Irkutsk.

As the minibus made its way to the jetty for the return ferry, it rocked and rolled over Olkhon’s bumpy paths the way it did when we first arrived.

Every so often, the brilliant blue of Lake Baikal would peek out between the trees and hills that shaped the island, and I found myself trying to catch as many last glimpses of that bright blue before it disappeared completely.

*Anis also writes at Five Foot Traveller.