Lake Baikal is one of those WHSs you can dedicate more time to and you will not regret it. And while we're at it, let me recommend you to plan your visit for winter, when the lake is under the ice. Not only is your scope of activities wider and modes of transportation more flavourful, but the whole experience would be that much more enjoyable. There is nothing like the majestic lake crusted with a thick layer of ice clear as glass.

Ivan and I went in March 2016 and took two guests with us: Ivan's brother-in-law and his classmate from the university, then created a custom trip for eight days around lake Baikal with a local tour operator Baikalika. They arranged accomodation and transport for us and a guide for a short three-hour-long sightseeing trip around Irkutsk. From there we drove to the Olkhon Island, spent two nights there, having many fun activities on the frozen lake (picnic on the ice, skating, exploring the ice caves, etc.) and enjoying our evenings in banya in our accomodation complex in Khuzhir. Incidentally, Khuzhir is a great place to explore in its own right. People still live there but it has this curious feeling of being forsaken and in abandon, helped by the rusting ships half sinking, frozen, with ice shards all around them. Shrines around Olkhon represent the two aspects of the local spiritual culture: the Buddhist and the Shamanist, each of them fascinating.

From Olkhon we moved on to Buguldeyka with some small walks along the coastline, then changed into a hovercraft that took us to Listvyanka - main tourist town on the shores of lake Baykal. Mayak Hotel is your recommended place to stay, it's the best you can get, their restaurant is very good, at least some semblance of English is spoken and their banya is fantastic. They provide everything, there is a generously sized pool with cold water and you can order very nice meals and vodka to the table just beside the pool. And it's privately rented, so all yours for three or four hours. As for activities in Listvyanka, there is mushing, nerpinarium, museum, you can take a ride on snow scooters and even have a picnic on a shard of ice they cut off and send down the stream of river Angara (and then pray they won't forget about you and come for you).

Another hovercraft took us across the lake to the Baikal State Natural Reserve, already part of the Buryatia Republic, where we took a hike into the actual reserve and then enjoyed lunch made by local Buryats. We also visited village of Tarabagatay where the People of Old Ways live (Starobryadtsi) whose polyphonic way of siging is an intangible World Heritage. There's also a village of Ivolginsk with their Buddhist datsan. After that, there's only a massive bust of Lenin in Ulan-Ude and you can fly back wherever you need to be via Moscow.

In summer the lake is swarmed by Russian tourists who camp there and our friends who went complained about the noise, the smell, the garbage and the mosquitoes. The only annoying thing in winter are many groups of tourists (mostly Asian and Russian, with some lost folks from Europe here and there) and the cold. Clothes that will keep you warm at the temperatures of around -20 C are a must and copious amounts of vodka constitute a good coping mechanism. Should you wish to make it a tour, the travel agency I mentioned above is good, they speak English and have good track record with foreign tourists. Anyone insane enough to spend couple of days on Russian train can take the Trans-Siberian railway all the way to Irkutsk, see the lake and then continue to Mongolia and Beijing. If you want to do it on your own, some accomodation options in Listvyanka are available online and you can arrange both taxi and marshrutka between Listvyanka and Irkutsk easily. Would I reccommend seeing this WHS? In a heartbeat!