It’s -25° today in Irkutsk. People keep on asking me why the hell I came here from Hawaii.

At -25 in November, water vapor rises from the river like steam from a kettle. Soon the river will be frozen and I will ice skate. Then Lake Baikal will freeze and I will ice dive. When the ice melts in the springtime, I would like to go to the Gobi Desert to see it bloom (a phenomenon that happens once a year, for about a week). Imagine the Gobi Desert in flowers.

I will explore Siberia and its rare, untouched beauty. The taiga, the rivers, the hot springs, the valley of volcanoes. Lake Baikal- the oldest, deepest and possibly the clearest lake on the planet. There are cliffs and mountains surrounding this lake, it’s so big that you can’t see the opposite end of the shore from many spots. In some places, the view is like New Zealand on steroids.

When Baikal freezes over, you can see several meters through the ice, to the bottom of the lake. Not the deepest part of course, as that’s 1.6 kilometers deep.

There are people that live in Irkutsk that have never seen Lake Baikal.

There are people that live on Hawaii that have never seen lava pouring into the ocean.

What do you live for? Do you live just to work, fuck and die?