By Pang-Mei

Alexis and I, who have lived in Moscow for the past six-seven years, are mad about Siberia. To us, it's the end of the earth and this attracts us in a primal way. Only after I had lived in Russia did Siberia become real to me (and not just the worst table in the house or the lover's freeze-out) because it's a big part of Russian history. First of all, the natural resources there are incredible: timber, oil, coal, aluminum, gold, silver, platinum, nickel, etc. Secondly, since the 1800s and through post-Stalin times, it's been a place of exile. Not only common criminals, but the best of the best were sent there to work the mines and stay out of trouble.

After their sentences, often they were not allowed to return to Moscow and St. Petersburg, so those who settled there are incredibly bright. Third, it's amazingly beautiful and isolated. Finally, I think I'm also attracted to it because it's precisely where China and Russia meet and it pulls together big parts of my identity. Lake Baikal is far even from Moscow, my home for the past five years. About $200 buys a round-trip ticket from Moscow to Irkutsk, a city in central Siberia (and birthplace of model Irina Pantaeva). It's a six-hour flight - after which you sail two hours up the Angara River before finally finding yourself on the edge of the 31,500 square kilometer (about 20,000 square mile) Baikal. Your first impression - endless glittering expanse and a faraway horizon - is of an ocean masquerading as a lake. Then you register the silence and isolation. No liners or jet skis, only wooden fishing boats with paddles. No yacht clubs or ports, only the occasional fishing settlement and scattered lone campsite. This is, after all, Siberia. The region's famed steppeland (arid grass-covered plains) and taiga (thick evergreen forests) dominate the shore view of our 24m boat, only one of twenty-five licensed vessels to chug along (at 20 km an hour) in the waters of the Baikal. Alexis, Sharon Ann and I have gathered here to celebrate Alexis' 30th birthday. What better way than three friends (with guide, captain, first mate and cook) on a 5-day boat trip in the middle of nowhere?

Rain, wind, and whitecaps today for Alexis's 30th. We grip onto anything that's riveted down and run through procedure drills for woman overboard and hypothermia. With the air temperature at just 10°C (50°F) in August, we get an inkling of winter here in the Baikal, when the lake freezes over so that cars drive, planes land, and fishermen cut a square hole in the ice, park their chairs for the season, and call it television. We fight nausea from the pitching boat. All for Alexis's primal need to be surrounded by water. Return to the womb, fine, but did she have to take us through the labor? Protracted agony: we will reach our destination, Olkhon Island, only tomorrow.

In preparation, we share what we have read on the area's indigenous people - the Buryat, Mongol hunters - and their shamans, mediums between the visible and invisible world who practice healing, divination and control over natural events. Born only once every other generation, a shaman is marked by a forked thumb and a white eagle that flies overhead when the baby is born. Inspired, we turn our eyes to the skies and are strangely calmed.