Olkhon, Baikal - mysteries ahead

Few foreigners visiting Russia dare invest a week or two into the Trans-Siberian route. Fewer Russians. If it hadn’t been for a friend, I might have never even thought of going east of Moscow. It’s cold out there. But there I was on the Olkhon Island in the middle of Lake Baikal feeling I was in the middle of nowhere. Little did I know of where I was.
As lucky as an average Moscow cubicle rat could be we only managed to get our vacations tuned in late September. “The summer is gone”, kept ticking in my head all the way. Having travelled by a plane, bus, ferry and a jeep, being more exhausted than excited, I freed myself into the wild and froze there, speechless, at the edge of a massive 40-meter rock drowning in a lake which is supposedly 30 million years old. With the average depth of more or less Burj Khalifa in Dubai, Baikal is the biggest fresh water lake in the world. No wonder the locals scoop and drink water right from the lake. The water is not only clean. It changes you forever. You will cry every time you take a sip of any other (disgusting) water for the rest of your life. It is home to equally tasty omul – a local fish you are bound to eat for breakfast, lunch and dinner while on the island. Unless you want to stay hungry.
It is also the open space and the emptiness which draws you in and forces to zoom out. Time stops. There is only you and the universe as old as thousands and millions of years. The worries of the modern-day life can’t reach you where you may need to walk around a bit with your arm stretched in the air and your eyes checking the network signal on your mobile phone before (or if) you finally hear familiar beeps of incoming messages.
There is another type of network if you are interested in connecting to cosmos. The island is famous for being a place of shaman rituals and I had to start believing some legends when out of curiosity and despite the best warnings of the locals I wanted to check out the cave of Bukhran rock and was nearly pulled into the water by a strange unexpected strong power. I managed to stop sliding the side of the rock a meter above the water which is so clear that it is difficult to see if it is one meter or ten meters deep. And I can’t swim. That animal fear and the further relief are the strongest emotions I have ever experienced. Even having a knife at my throat in a small dark street in Tbilisi, Georgia would never beat that. I did learn to pause. And ask. And listen. And hear. And enjoy the silence.