Back to Ulan-Ude

We had to drive back to Ulan-Ude today in preparation for catching the plane early tomorrow morning to Moscow. So once again we packed our bags and headed off after breakfast. Michael had a work meeting he had to attend via Skype for an hour but this gave us time to get ready.

We decided to stop for one last jaunt over the lake and pulled up where we had stopped for the first sunset the other night. There were a few fishermen out so we became a little braver and walked out further onto the lake. We were curious about the fishing so went to examine one of the holes that had been made. It was actually a lot smaller than we expected, only about 20cm diameter. We could see the ice was quite deep through the hole so that made us feel more secure! The fishermen had a long sort of corkscrew tool they used to make their holes in the ice. We walked past one older guy and he seemed to have more old school tools. His fishing rod only looked like a short stick with a bit of line attached!

We made our way back to the car, I managed to get a wet foot due to a puddle iced over on top of the ice which was annoying!

Kyria was keen to go for a hike through the forest and maybe up one of the mountains but we couldn’t find a track that was suitable, either the road was too muddy or there was no where to park the car so we gave up on the plan. It would have been fun!

We stopped off at Haim where there was a nice river and bridge to get some photos and poke around. The boys has fun skating on the ice on the river - we were waiting for them to skate right off into the river! 😂

It was an uneventful trip the rest of the way. I had packed a few activity bags for plane trips and car trips so Heidi was suitably amused.

Back in Ulan-Ude the traffic was a little heavier than on the way out and it was bumper to bumper at times. Heidi’s little voice piped up ‘come on!’ while we were crawling along! 😂 At one point our lane seemed to end abruptly and there was a little chaos as everyone was pushing to the other side of the tram line, in between oncoming trams - no lights, just free for all!

We are back at the apartment we initially stayed at. The boys have gone to clean the car and return it and I have put Heidi to bed. I only bought four books to read with her. She doesn’t like two of them so we’re only allowed to read the other two. I am so sick of ‘Where is the green sheep’ and ‘We’re going on a bear hunt’ 😩Read more