Siberia. Magadan to Novosibirsk via the Road of Bones. Picking up from Tanks, a Cat on a Bench, and Lenin’s Biggest Fan: Chita to Ulan-Ude. The series starts here: We Needed an Expedition, Not a Holiday.

Leaving Ulan-Ude, a statue saw us off — a Buryat archer on horseback, releasing a bird into the sky, the Youth of Buryatia standing guard over the road to Lake Baikal.

After days of nothing but steppe, Janine and I turned it into a competition: whoever spotted the lake first, won.

Janine won. Unsurprisingly.

We drove along its edge, crossed a bridge, and turned onto a dirt track down to the shore. I’d thought, vaguely, about a proper swim. The water put a stop to that idea fairly quickly. Janine took one look and decided watching was plenty. Olga and I waded out to a rock and called it close enough.

I couldn’t feel my feet for a good while afterward.

Warming up on the driftwood, Olga filled in what I didn’t know: Baikal holds more fresh water than any lake on the planet — a fifth of the world’s entire unfrozen supply — sitting in a rift valley still slowly pulling itself apart. Come winter it freezes solid enough to drive a car straight across.

Near the southern end we passed a highway bridge under construction, its deck balanced on a small forest of yellow scaffolding towers. We got up the hill just before they closed the road for a vehicle recovery further along.

Irkutsk gave us the presidential suite at the International Hotel, right on the river. In the evening we walked Gagarin Boulevard, past his statue, down to the night market before dinner.

Greg had work to do the next day, so Janine and I took it for ourselves and drove straight back out to Lake Baikal. What else do you do with a day off in Siberia?

Halfway there we stopped at the Taltsy Architectural and Ethnographic Museum, a village of relocated historic buildings with craft stalls scattered through it. I came away with a clay bear whistle, on the basis that one whistle from the trip wasn’t enough.

At the lake we visited the Baikal Museum, where the real draw was the nerpa — Baikal seals, the only seal species on earth that lives entirely in fresh water. Short and fat, built expressly to fight off the cold, which they seemed to be managing without complaint.

Down by the lake we stopped at a café for lunch overlooking the water, then a lookout, then the obligatory photo beside the Baikal Hotel sign.

Driving back I filled up on petrol, remembering to write “P” for petrol on the payment slip, alongside however many roubles we guessed we’d need. That evening Greg joined us in the suite to relive the day, and between the three of us we finished off his Mongolian vodka.

Dinner was at Marco Polo — gold light, a fish tank running the length of the bar, a cabaret singer working a stage for an audience of three: us, and one other customer. We ordered without Olga, through pointing, gestures, and the handful of Russian words we’d picked up by then.

We got, more or less, what we expected to eat.