Krasnoyarsk & Novosibirsk

We spent Saturday and Sunday in Krasnoyarsk--Saturday we looked around town, caught a few minutes of an Orthodox service, and hiked to a small chapel on the hill above town. The view was beautiful and we took a little picnic with us. Sunday morning, after our adventures trying to go to Church, we went out to the nature reserve beyond town where they have some interesting rock formations. We took a ski lift up to the top of the mountain, but unfortunately you could only see one of the rock formations from there, and there weren't really any trails to walk over into the reserve.

That afternoon we rode a hydrofoil up the river about 45 minutes to where there is a huge power-generating dam. The man who drove us and a couple from England (more on them later) around, told us that they couldn't build locks for the ships to go around the dam because it is so high it would require too many locks. Instead, they built one lock-chamber, which moves on a cog railway from the top of the dam to the bottom, and vice-versa. Pretty interesting!

The couple we shared the tour with are doing a London to Ulaanbaatar car rally. They have driven all the way from London, and if they make it to Mongolia their car (a 70's Beetle) will be auctioned for charity. I say "if" because they have already spent more time waiting for repairs than on the road (about 15-20 days of repairs, I think). They had been in Krasnoyarsk a week already waiting for a part to be shipped from London. Needless to say they had a lot of very interesting stories. Margo pointed out that nearly all of the mishaps occured in Ukraine.

On the train to Novosibirsk (where this post is from) we asked one of our Russian cabin mates what we should see here. He said there wasn't much to see, and he was right. We went to a museum on the Trans-Siberian RR which was really neat, and other than that we spent most of the day (well, 2 hours at least) mailing ourselves a package with some souvenirs we picked up along the way.

For those following on the maps at home, our next three stops are:
Omsk
Tobolsk (via Tyumen)
Yekaterinburg