Sunday 16th July – Ulan Ude

• Tour meeting at Hotel Marrakesh at 10am.  Your tour guide will go through our itinerary before we head off in the city of Ulan-Ude
• We go check out Ulan Ude’s world famous Lenin Head Statue. It is three-story high!
• We then head to Victory Park, the biggest park of Ulan-Ude, filled with soviet statues and the best place to people-watch in Ulan-Ude
• Lunch at restaurant Tengis, specialised in Buryat fare.
• We take a taxi and head north to Ulan Ude Ethnographic Museum. This open-air museum is one of the biggest in Russia, with over 11,000 exhibits. It will help us get an idea of the history of the land and the Buryat people.
• We head back to town for dinner, this time at restaurant Buryatia. Every night, they put on a special buryat performance.
• Walk around town to check out the cathedrals, statues and the Selenge statues
• Stop by a classic soviet era bar to quench our thirst reasonably. We’re taking an early train tomorrow!
• Overnight at our hotel

Monday 17th July – Train/Irkutsk

• Early morning check-out as we board train 069Я to Irkutsk. Along the way, we will pass some of Russia’s most magnificent sceneries. If you wanted to see the best of the transsiberian railway without actually doing the whole ride, this is it!
• Arrival in Irkutsk at 16:20 local time.
• Walking Tour of the 130^th Quarter, we go to churches and monasteries, the planetarium and public observatory, the Eksperimentary Museum of Science, the ‘Window to Asia’ exhibition and the House of Folk Arts, all built to celebrate Irkutsk’s 350^th anniversary
• Head out for dinner at Rassolnik, a restaurant serving local recipes in a nostalgic soviet décor and drinks to find out what goes for a night out in Russia’s Far East!
• Overnight in Irkutsk

Tuesday 18th July – Listvyanka

• Breakfast at the Hotel
• We drive to the nearby village of Listvyanka to have our first look at Baikal Lake.
• Drive out to Listvyanka village at Lake Baikal and check out the fish market and then scour the souvenirs market for Soviet kitsch. We get the opportunity to swim in the lake.
• Picnic using local produces and Baikal, a local vodka famed all around Russia.
• Visit Baikal Museum where huge aquariums are refilled with water from the lake and head on to the Under the Open Sky Museum
• Drive back to Irkutsk
• Dinner at a Nomad Restaurant. Those of us who were in Mongolia previously will reminisce on the taste of that wild land.
• Evening walk around town, as this is a YPT tour, we’ll make our compulsory visit to a statue of Lenin
• Overnight in Irkutsk

Wednesday 19th July – Olkhon Island

• Early breakfast in the hotel
• Depart for Olkhon Island, one of the largest lake islands in the world. It’s a 5-6 hour journey by bus and ferry but the scenery we pass through means it feels like a short trip!
• Check in to our accommodation on the island
• Lunch at the hotel Baikalov Ostrog styled after building built during the conquest of Siberia.
• Visit Khuzhir village, the main settlement on the island and home to mostly Buryats, the native ethnic group
• We’ll head on a trek to Burkhan Cape.
• Dinner and overnight in Khuzhir

Thursday 20th July – Olkhon Island

• Head out after breakfast up to the northernmost point of the island – Khoboy using 4X4 to get there off-road!
• We enjoy a traditional Buryat lunch cooked on an open fire of barbecued slated fish and ukha – traditional fisherman’s soup
• We stop by Uzury a quaint and pleasant hamlet isolated from the rest of the world to understand how people live around here.
• Head back to Khuzir and relax in a banya bath house (optional extra)
• Dinner and overnight in Khuzir, we’ll keep warm with the help of an old friend – vodka!

Friday 21st July – Olkhon Island

• Today, we’ll head to the southern part of Olkhon for most of the day. We will first take a boat to island Ogoy.
• We will be Island Hopping around the Islet of the Small Sea.
• We finally reach Ogoy Island where the stupa of enlightenment, a holy site for the Buddhist Buryat, can be found.
• It is hard to believe that we are still in the middle of a lake, as we will pass through steppes, sandy beaches and taiga.
• We make our way to Khuzhir, stopping on the way in many of the abandoned villages, including Peschanaya, that used to form Stalin’s Fish gulags. While its history has been darkened, it remains a place of serene beauty.

Saturday 22nd July – Olkhon/Irkutsk

• Breakfast at the hotel
• Today, we have to cross all the way back to Irkutsk by bus, but the road ahead of us is certainly one of the most beautiful in the world.
• Arrival in Irkutsk in the evening.
• Dinner in the 130^th Quarter followed by a pub crawl of the many bars in the surroundings. After all, we have to celebrate our last day!

Sunday 23rd July

• Breakfast in the hotel and end of tour
• End of tour. Connections by train and plane can be arranged by YPT.

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