In and around Irkutsk (December 13th)


Grandma and Irina both got up at five in the morning to say goodbye to us and then we were out on the cold platform, still bleary eyed and not having a clue what to do or where to go. We quickly ran into the ticket hall, which was more like a living morgue than anything else, with characters of all sorts tucked into chairs, asleep or falling asleep, whilst a dodgy flick blared out form the tiniest of TV screens. It was another two hours until the ticket office opened and we were cold so we decided to head straight for a hotel and ended up in one of the biggest in the city, overlooking a lovely park with incredible ice sculptures in it (think bridges and huge slides and grottoes and labyrinths). Not a cheap hotel, but then nothing is in Russia and it was on a par with everything else - though there was nothing standard about it. We opted for the cheapest, non renovated rooms, which were perfectly fine but a complete throw back to the 60’s when the hotel opened. The curtains were the most amazing I have ever seen - all peach polyestered up and adorned with Hawaiian hula girls doing their thing. After our first shower in three days (though we still looked and felt perfectly clean) we headed down the corridor for breakfast in the Pink Flamingo, which we think is the breakfast room, just for our floor. Each floor seems to run as a separate entity with its own floor managers, security and housekeeping. Very bizarre. And if that was odd, breakfast was an even stranger affair. More like a night club than restaurant, the Pink Flamingo’s curtains were drawn, the girls were in short pink (obviously) skirts and the decor wouldn’t go amiss in Stringfellows (from what I hear)! Old school dance and Russian tracks were pumping out of the stereo and the clientele made us certain that we had stepped into the set of some slightly dubious movie set.

Back at the room, we simply couldn’t last and fell asleep for a few hours - this train travel malarky is weirdly exhausting. We woke up to find our bathroom ceiling had fallen in - as they do, so we promptly moved next door, before, still slightly weary, we headed out to discover Irkutsk. Irkutsk is known as the ‘Paris of Siberia’ though where the parallels are drawn, I can’t quite see. None-the-less it is a lovely city and has a small and homely yet up date and relaxed feel about it. On the surface it seems more like a town than a city but the landscape stretches beyond where you expect and in rush hour the roads on the outskirts of the central area become mayhem.

Amidst the newer buildings are cosy looking log cabins, all decorated with intricate fret work on the eaves and window frames. They are simply gorgeous and the streets where they are the predominant buildings take you back to a bygone era and you really feel like you have stepped back in time. This is where many of the Decemberists were exiled to and a number of their houses still exist. Some of the wooden buildings are truly striking and more like mini mansions than log cabins - these were the home to those who quite literally struck gold, in the gold rush era, making the equivalent of nearly hundreds of millions today, practically overnight. Other houses are more simple affairs, much smaller but still with the grandeur of the fret work. In some areas of town there were whole pockets of these wooden structures, whilst other stood in solitude next to newer, concrete buildings. There are far fewer wooden houses here than the city originally had as in 1879 a fire destroyed 75% of them and sadly, today many of them are falling into disrepair and some are quite literally sinking into the ground, perhaps as a result of the weather not being quite so cold as it used to be and layers of permafrost melting.

That said, it’s not exactly warm here in the winter! If you take your hands out of your gloves for more than a minute the pain kicks in, despite this, somehow the locals seem to have adapted and are happy to stand in the icey cold smoking away, sans gloves. There is little wind, which makes it pleasant enough if you are cosied up as we are in our extreme weather gear but the ground is frozen solid, with thick patches of black ice near drainpipes which see plenty of people skating over them for fun, although surprisingly few people slipping on them. This is especially odd as the local girls refuse to step out of their excrutiatingly high heeled boots, which are not practical for any day’s outing, let alone in such icy conditions. Dolled up to the nines with more fur than I ever thought possible, there are impossibly beautiful. Fur coats of all shapes, colours and patterns, accessorised with incredible hats in all manner of different styles, including the often favoured box hat with flaps (the bigger the hat the better) were out in force. It seems that everybody has furs and they aren’t cheap, despite Irkutsk being one of the major fur suppliers in the world. That said, £2,000 here gets you a lot more than Harrods would ever offer. The men do not miss out and whilst they favour leather jackets to fur coats, their hats are traditional and stylish and somehow make even the less attractive men look striking.

There is a far greater fusion of nationalities here than we have seen in St Petersburg or Moscow. This area of Russia is home to the indigenous Buryats, of Mongolian descent and there is also Polish heritage - this mixed with the already striking Russian women, makes for a model scout’s paradise. And everyone seems even more beautiful, with their strong faces framed by delicate and fascinating fur hats. Everyone looks super rich too, though of course they are not all. But you put a girl in heels and furs and give her a decent bag and she is going to look all cashed up.

There is a main area of activity in the centre of Irkutsk, which is home to a huge Central Market and also a wonderful food hall - again Harrods eat your heart out - your hall is nothing compared to this, which has everything you could imagine from bright fruits, colourful flowers, rows of pastries and pasties and nuts and dried goods, plus lines of fish including the famous Umal that Grandma told us so much about. In the actual Central Market you can buy everything you could imagine, from tacky dolls and tit bits to underwear, hideous clothes and amazing furs. Whilst on the main roads were expensive jewelers and top end high street brands, mixed in with fast fashion chains and the like. For lunch we opted for a pancake with fillings that we think were chicken, some other meat, cheese and some white soure that they put on everything. Regardless of not quite knowing what was in them, they were scrumptious and perfectly filled the hole, created on our long walk around town.

There are also a number of lovely cathedrals and churches in the city, and though we popped into one, we decided to spend the day walking around and enjoying the atmosphere rather than spending it in museums and such. We walked along the river’s edge that was covered in snow, with patches of the river frozen solid, making perfect little islands for the ducks to escape to. We passed a number of monuments and statues and some impressive but utterly ugly Soviet buildings and sculptures that stood powerfully above all those near it.

In total contradiction to anything Soviet, we were hoping to experience a night out in the pink Flamingo, but sadly, despite its decor it wasn’t in fact a night club but was simply just a restaurant so we opted for fruit we had bought at the market and some nibbles from the ‘London Pub’ downstairs, where the girls were rather oddly for a London pub, in tartan. It didn’t surprise us though, this hotel is all about slightly odd uniforms, from the short pink skirts at breakfast to the angels in the downstairs lobby bar - why would the London pub staff not be wearing tartan?