The sky is a blinding white and blue, and the little minibus from Listvianka to Irkutsk flits over the folds of the Angara Valley like a bumblebee, slightly ungainly and, to an observer, perhaps not quite in control of its trajectory, but confident in its own path and in the completion of its journey. We’ve seen our last of Baikal. One last run alongside daughter Angara and James and I will get our final glimpse of the lake’s cobalt water, bearing northwest for the turbines and factories of the Angarsk industrial corridor and then, slightly tarnished, on to her rendezvous with her beloved Yenisei and finally the Arctic ocean, 2,500 river kilometers downstream. One last pass through Irkutsk, and we’ll be back on the beast-machine bound for Moscow and beyond, and a world more familiar if still not known. We’ve seen our last of Baikal, but I’m pretty sure that I, anyway, am not leaving it behind, that it will never quite stop flowing through me. Blood has the same salinity as the ocean, someone once told me—we never really left the sea, we just carry it around inside us. Alas, this little detail of life turns out to be just too exquisite to be true, but it sure works as metaphor—we all carry around a biological memory of where and what we come from, from the water that makes up roughly sixty percent of our bodies to the ninety-eight or so percent of our genes that we share with chimpanzees. And so it is with Baikal—the lake inseparable from the people who love it in so many complex and ambiguous ways—I’ll carry a piece of it around in every part of me, like a new strand of DNA that has spliced itself in with mine and changed ever so slightly who I am and how I live in the world. For our last couple of nights back in Irkutsk, James and I stay in a downtown hotel, for about three times the cost of the American House, where, Olga tells us, we can finally get our visas properly registered.
AMBIGUITY ON SYARIAH TOURISM IN INDONESIA