
Evening at Lake Baical
Although panoramas don’t seem to go down that well with some of you (maybe it’s because in order to fit in the blog they have to be quite small), today I have another panorama to post, this time from Lake Baikal. Alongside Irkutsk, Lake Baikal is probably one of the most visited places in Siberia and as you probably already know it is the deepest lake in the world, with a maximum depth of 1600m. It contains about 1/5 of the world’s fresh water and about 80% of Russia’s fresh water. Basically, it’s huge!
We choose Olkhon Island as the base for our trip to Lake Baical, which is about 6 hours away from Irkutsk, including a 15 minute ferry crossing. Olkhon Island is the largest island in Lake Baikal and is considered one of the 5 Shaman energy centers in the world. But more on that in a later post, when I will tell you about the Buryats, the local people of the Lake Baical area.
In this part of Siberia, even in the middle of the summer, at night it’s only about 8 degrees Celsius. Just after sunset, at about 11.00pm, the temperature was dropping fast and because I was only wearing a t-shirt I only snapped a few shots, enough to put 3 together into this panorama. The photograph is pretty much straight out of the camera, with just one Photoshop curve adjusting the contrast.
As with all the panoramas I post, I recommend viewing the larger size.