Baikal

 The Baikal Lake is the diamond of Eastern Siberia.  It contains almost a quarter of the world resources of fresh water and this water is the most transparent and clear in the world.  A white dist of 30sm in diameter can be seen in the Baikal water even at the depth of 40 meters! The Baikal Lake is 636km long and 20 to 80km wide.  It is a birthplace of a unique ecosystem that includes a huge number of wild life species found only in this area of the world.  Locals and many other people in Russian traditionally consider the Baikal Lake to be a sea.  There are 336 rivers and streams falling into the Baikal Lake but this number includes only constant inflows.  The largest of them are the Selenga, the Upper Angara, the Barguzin, the Turka, the Snezhnaya, and the Sarma rivers.   There is one river springing out of the lake – the Angara river. There are 27 islands in the Baikal Lake, the largest of which is Olkhin (730km²); the largest peninsula is the Holly Nose.

The lake is situated in a sort of bolson surrounded by mountains and bald peaks on all sides.  At that the Western shore is rocky and steep, and the Eastern shore terrain is more sloping (in some places mountains are dozens kilometres away from the shore).