Alternative day. We get up early (at 5.30 am) and we have breakfast. Cereals and nuts, banana and a long coffee, like most other mornings. We wash our faces with ice-cold water so as to wake up well, shake off the night’s torpor and give a good morning to our dreams.
With a sweater and a woolen cap, we enjoy the sunrise on our bikes. We go down to the port where there will be the ferry that will take us to Port Baikal. Soon we understand that the ferry will not sail from that port, but from the secondary port, down there at the end of the village. We have 15 minutes and 4 km to do. We can do it, except for the fear of losing it (for the next we would have to wait too much). We start riding and our bikes take off, regardless of the cold air that whips our cheeks and for the drops of sweat along the back.
We dock in Port Baikal, a village that seems uninhabited, connected to the rest of the world only thanks to the boats or the small railway line. We wait for the train that will take us to Slyudyanka (we don’t earn any day, but we avoid making unreliable roads), appreciating the first rays of sun that shine on the lake. When the stationmaster arrives, we discover that the cost to load the bikes is incredibly high, and we have to pay in cash. “We don’t have so much money in the wallet, and we don’t even want to spend it on a similar trip” we say smiling. So we decide not to get on that train, aware of the fact that the next, the cheapest one, will start in 16 hours.
