Olkhon Island and gold teeth

The guy in the hostel arranged for us to be collected on Wednesday morning to go to Olkhon Island and said that we could return on Friday. He said his brother was the bus driver. It was a six hour bus journey in a mini bus. The mini bus was full and as usual we were the only tourists who spoke English. There was ice in the inside of the windows so we couldn't see out the side windows.

View from the bus

About 2 hours into it the mini bus started struggling. Eventually we stopped at a roadside restaurant and the guys started working on fixing the mini bus. The got it fixed but now the accelerator was  controlled by a belt that was coming out from under the dashboard, they had also re-arranged the seats in the mini bus so some guy could help the driver with the new modified accelerator. The quality of the roads soon deteriorated and so did visibility.

No more roads

We made it to the ferry with some time to spare. I spent the first part of the journey sitting in a small room on the ferry but then decided to go up on deck. It was snowing heavily and a Russian guy who appeared to have something to do with the ferry was talking to us. He didn't have any English and didn't seem to get that we couldn't understand him. He kept talking, we kept laughing. This continued for the duration of the ferry trip. He had more visible gold teeth than he had real teeth.

Russian guy on the ferry

We got to Olkhon Island safely and there were 2 mini buses waiting for us.

View of Olkhon as we arrived

We didn't have any accomodation booked but we knew of a guest house so we told the mini bus guys to bring us there. Well we didn't actually tell them, we got on the bus and after a half hour of driving they started talking to us in Russian so we said "Nikatas" which is the name of the place that we were expecting to stay. Eventually they stopped the bus and told us to get off and we were at the guest house...