Big Lakes

The planning of our trip is going very well. We've decided on an itinerary for the (mostly rail) journey to New Zealand:

London-Brussels-Berlin-Warsaw-Moscow-Irkutsk-Ulan Ude-Ulan Bator-Beijing-Shanghai-Auckland.

How fun does that look? We seem to have found a good price for the Moscow-Beijing leg of the journey, first class, through Intourist who specialise in Trans-Siberian journeys, both packages and self-made. We have been dealing by email with them and they seem very good indeed.

My first memory of hearing the name Irkutsk is in the Red Dwarf episode where Rimmer is banging on about a really old game of Risk and, bizarrely, remembers each dice throw he made. Lister queries the interest of each dice throw and he responds with: "Well it was interesting to me, it got me into Irkutsk." (Red Dwarf, Season 4, Episode 6: "Meltdown")

After some research, it seems that Irkutsk is a very interesting place indeed. For one, it is a few kilometres from Lake Baikal (Buy-karl), the world's largest freshwater lake. Having been brought up on many Lake District and North Wales holidays, I naively expected Baikal to be a little bit bigger than, say, Coniston or Bala. No! Lake Baikal's rought dimensions are 40 X 400... Miles! That's the distance from Glasgow to London, long! It is so big it features its own indigenous fish, some of which apparently give birth to their young fully formed and ready to go! Man, I can't wait to 'lout-it-out' around this place in my England shirt...