KC, We're not in Florida Anymore!

Flat KC on Lake Baikal

Ice Fishing!  I'm doing this for Jim out of friendship.  Our ride is due to arrive at 6AM Saturday, April 10th, so we're up at 5:15 packing up for the weekend.  They finally arrive at 7AM and we drive on paved road for three hours toward Lake Baikal, stopping for bait (live crustaceans that look like 1/4 inch long shrimp) and to ask the gods for their blessings.  No kidding!  The Buriyat people, who live around Lake Baikal and look identical to Mongolians traditionally have 99 gods, 55 good, and 44 bad.  So we stop at a wooden open structure along the road, add our coins to the thousands already there, drink some vodka, and tie cloth strips around the wooden supports.

Finally, we turn off the paved road to a dirt road for several kilometers, then turn off the dirt road to no road where the traffic wardens hand a paper to each car telling how to drive on the ice.  We reach the edge of the frozen lake (ice 1.3-1.5 meters thick) and drive the Toyota Land Cruiser for several miles onto the lake.  We are in a portion of the lake called the "small sea", the only shallow area.  The wind is 30 miles per hour and the temperature in the teens.  So what do we do?  We leave the warm vehicle, hand drill 8" holes in the ice and fish!

Before losing any fingers or ears to frostbite, we head to a restaurant on the ice!  It is a Buriyat ger, like a Mongolian yurt.  Inside are a Buriyat mother and her 3 daughters who start cooking our fish and making dumplings.  Andrei talks the mother into letting him drill a fishing hole inside the ger!

Jim ice fishing inside a restaurant

The fish and dumplings were delicious, so what to do next.  One of the gang gathers a few scrap pieces of firewood from outside the restaurant and we drive several miles on the ice to a more remote part of the lake and do skeet shooting with the firewood as skeet.

Jim and I have been up since shortly after 5AM and it is now approaching sunset.  I cannot speak for him, but sleep is all I have on my frozen mind.  Our hosts, however, think nothing finishes the day like a баня (russian sauna) complete with getting beaten all over with birch branches.  The temperature in the sauna is supposed to be 95 degrees Centigrade (203 Fahrenheit, I think).  It feels like my skin is burning, then we go out into the snow, then back into the sauna, then beaten (massaged they call it) with the hot birch branches.  Sleep comes sometime after midnight with more ice fishing promised for the next day.