Beautiful Lake Baikal Russia

Stunning Scenery, Delicious Fresh (and Smoked) Fish, Cute Freshwater Seals, and Dodgy Accommodation

Listvyanka is a small village on the banks of Lake Baikal, about 1.5 hours from Irkutsk. Due to its close proximity to Irkutsk, it is a popular summer holiday town for Russians and is now becoming a destination on the Chinese tour bus route.

We arrived around lunchtime and found our guesthouse, which, quite frankly, was a dive. When we were looking for accommodation, we had searched for an apartment but couldn’t find one. Later, we discovered that we had arrived before the season really began, and many of the rental properties had not yet opened.

The guesthouse was run by a family, and everything was poorly built. The doors didn’t close properly, people were crammed in everywhere, the toilet was leaking, and so on. However, this is all part of the travel experience. It was just unfortunate that both places we had stayed in Russia so far had been a bit below average.

Lake Baikal is stunning, with crystal-clear blue water and fishing boats puttering up and down, surrounded by huge snow-capped mountains. Listvyanka felt like a frontier town to me. It’s quite scruffy and a bit unkempt, but the Russians love it and flock there in the hundreds on the weekends to sit on the pebble beach and go on boat rides. Some even swim in the freezing cold water of the lake, which was about 5 degrees when we were there.

The town has a fish market that sells a local lake fish called Omul, which they smoke. Omul is delicious, and in the season, you can buy it at the market or from one of the many locals who set up smokers at their front gates and sell directly to the public.

One day, we walked a couple of kilometers to the Baikal Museum, one of the few museums that focuses on the lake. I found it a little science-heavy, and the two Nerpa seals housed in a tiny dark tank were disturbing, but it did give us a good understanding of the lake’s huge size and the volume of water in it.

After the museum, we walked up a hill to a chairlift, which took us to the top of the hill and provided an incredible view toward Port Baikal and across the lake. From the lookout, we walked back down the hill to the lake. We had to be careful when walking as we saw warnings everywhere about encephalitis-bearing ticks in the local forests, so we stuck to the roads and didn’t spend too much time near the forests.

We spent five days in Listvyanka, ate some reasonable food, drank beer at a cafe with a deck over the water, and by day five were well and truly ready to move on.

Traveling in Russia was far more planned than we liked, but as we could only get a 30-day visa and had many kilometers to cover, we had to plan things (i.e., book train tickets). Plus, when applying for a visa, you have to list the towns and dates you will visit. While we didn’t stick to this strictly, we didn’t want to deviate too much from it.

We left Listvyanka and headed back to Irkutsk to hop on the train to Krasnoyarsk, a town still in Eastern Siberia, 18 hours and 1,062 km away.

For more information on traveling in Russia, read our Russia Travel Guide.