A wave rolls towards the shore, underground. The water licks on the thick ice cover, triggers a low rumble. Sharp bangs spreading like a net. Suddenly the wide crack a few meters next to us begins to live. A crunch, like two steel plates that rub together. Slowly, a thick sheet of ice pushes over the other, piles up more than a meter. Fascinated, with a sinking feeling in the stomach, we are watching the spectacle. Then again silence.

In the evening we are telling Vladimir about it. "Äto Baikal," nods the old forester only, “that's HIM”. For the locals, the Baikal is more than a lake. He brings life and takes life. When they speak of it, then often in the third person. When we ride the frozen Baikal from south to north the next few days we feel it as well: Some kind of magic. If we curse loudly crossing a difficult ice zone, we apologize for it immediately inwardly: "Forgive me, it was not meant that way."
On the Olkhon island, we have arranged to meet up with Igor, an experienced ice jeep driver. He marks us large cracks, gives us tips on where and how we can cross them. At Pokoyniki Cape his finger pauses for a few seconds on the map. "Here, you should not stop," he says curtly. Later, we hear stories about visions and strange voices in the air. A legend of mysterious deaths in a nearby Buriad's village is told. The Baikal is the oldest lake in the world. It holds many secrets.

The booming of the ice still in our ears, we ride in a couchette on the Baikal-Amur Magistrale more than a thousand kilometers northeast, to the starting point of the legendary Kolyma Highway. It's the only road through the outermost corner of Siberia. We travel "Platzkart", are sharing the coaches with rough road and mine workers who are on the way to their nine-month job. Some of them more than four thousand miles away from home, three quarters of the year away from wife and children. Oleg from Belarus, who sleeps in the lower bunk, shows us the next morning photos of his family, a pretty woman with a little boy in her arms and a blonde girl at school age by the hand. The car is completely overheated, it stinks of instant noodles, sweat and Vodka. And yet we are grateful not to be on the road like the convicts seventy years ago. The Kolyma Highway has a nickname - the road of bones. Millions were deported during Stalin's purges into the gulags of Yakutia and Magadan, hundreds of thousands died during the construction of the road in the swamps and forests of Eastern Siberia. "Few were guilty, most of them innocent" is written on a plaque on the roadside.

The Russian Republic of Sakha is almost as large as India. Their capital city, situated on the banks of Lena river, is the coldest city in the world. In December and January the thermometer barely rises above -45 degrees during the day. The Soviet blocks stand on massive concrete pillars, so as not to thaw the permafrost. Now in the beginning of March, it is merely minus fifteen. In the evening, we are invited to a vanilla ice cream by Andrei and Gavriel, two Russian doctors we met in the hotel, and as we stroll on the Lenin square the next afternoon, we see teenagers in sweatshirts enjoying the warm sunshine. It could be somewhere in Asia, in Korea or Mongolia. The Sacha are a people with Turk roots. They've fair skin, dark hair, delicate features with slanted eyes and flat noses. They speak a guttural language full of Üs and Äs. Their traditions have little to do with Russia. Fences with wind-blown ribbons on the rayon borders, large carved wooden posts, the horse as a sacred symbol. Heritage of the ancient nature religion.

On the sign at the entrance of Üchügei there's a reindeer next to the horse. Evens, the reindeer nomads make with 3% only a small part of the population. They are the reason why we are taking a detour from the main road in the area around Omjakon. Kyrril drives us by snowmobile into the wild to his father Fiodr who is still living in a tent all year round. He follows the migration of his flock, protects the reindeer from hungry wolves, lives on and with them. Inside the tent reindeer skins are lying on the floor, a small iron stove thumps from heat next to the entrance. It smells of resin and pine needles. Fiodr pours tea in tin cups and then continue his crossword puzzle. Now and then he looks up, turns a few buttons on his radio, throws a new piece of wood into the fire, while from the outside the tramp of hundreds of reindeer is heard.

On the second afternoon, the two capture reindeer with the lasso and harness them to a birch wood sled. The return journey to the village is traditionally... The sled race, we are witnessing at the annual festival a week later then only has little to do with a cozy Jingle Bells. Proudly the Evens are showing their skills in the lasso throwing, reindeer riding and sledding. The snow is thrown around, the tongues of the reindeer hanging almost to the ground and more than one driver is swept from the sled in a curve. But it's worth it: The winner awaits a brand new quad bike.

In the Republic of Sakha mineral resources in the billions are lying around. Since Stalin's times of the gulags gold is mined here. First from the prisoners, with nothing more than "a crowbar, a how, a shovel and a spoon." Blast holes have been burrowed into the permafrost to blow up the ground to a depth of three meters. Then in spring, the mountain streams full of melt water shot through the middle of the denuded gold fields. The work of the gold diggers began. Even today thirty tons of gold leave the region annually. On the world market of diamond mining Sacha is a leader. Russia is Europe's largest oil and gas supplier. The richest deposits are found here in Eastern Siberia. All these resources lie actually on the home land of Evens, but the original inhabitants benefited nothing from them. The opposite is the case, their natural pastures are increasingly limited and are destroyed from the pollution. For miles we cycle through river valleys, which look as if they had been plowed from a colony of giant moles. In front of our eyes we see the famous drama about the struggle for resources. Tradition and progress, the environment against the economy, power and powerlessness.

Yuri, the meteorologist in the Meteostanzia of Deliankur hesitates when we ask him about people in Ozernoe: "... njet, liudi njeto" he says, though, an inhabited house has been left, but he did not know if we can stay there overnight. Since it is only 4 o'clock and the sun in April now shines till nine, we decide to ride the thirty kilometers. Ozernoe turns out to be one of the many scary ghost towns we cycle through on the Kolyma Highway again and again. Mining towns that have lost their raison d'être after the exploitation, forced settlements from the Soviet era that were abandoned after the collapse. But suddenly we hear a dog barking. At the river bottom, hidden behind some trees, we find a small cottage with smoking chimney. Wooden skis with leather straps, a rusty snowmobile including sled in front of it. An elderly man with Evenian traits opens the door to a den of thieves.

The ceiling and walls are blackened by smoke, the windows almost blind. Four other men at different ages appear from the next room. We drink tea, ask for reindeer, as we can only imagine this as a livelihood. No, since the collapse of the Soviet Union there are no reindeer here any more. How devastating the end of the USSR must have been for this outposts. From one day to the other people lost their jobs in the state farms and were forced to self-catering again. We don't find out from what the men are living today. Panning for gold? Hunting? Late an old Lada arrives. Another man enters. He brings sugar from the store which lies one hundred kilometers away. Of course, he finds place in the house as well. In the cold, no one is left outside, which we now know. Also we were invited again and again in the recent weeks, were given food and shelter without having accepted our money. Today, however, it is really tight. We sleep in the one square meter large kitchen on the floor. At midnight the dog brings us a bone.

It thaws. The road's ice sheet breaks up, leaving behind mud, dirt and water which can't seep. Still 500 km left to Magadan. We begin to count, kilometer signs become to annual dates. We try to connect them to Russia's past, with the result that also mentally we are digging in the mud now. Amazing, but we have no idea what was going on 500 years ago in the biggest country of the world. Only 100km before Magadan, when the asphalt begins, we can come up with a few inglorious data – October revolution 1917 (km) - Stalin 1927 (km) - Chernobyl 1986 (km) ... negative incidents without exeption. The closer we get to the present, the more stubborn they appear. Suddenly we seem to know a lot about this country. Dark past, a failed world power, unpredictable ...

The 2000km post whizzes past. The bugaboo of Putin rises out. The fear of his energy empire and its dependence haunts trough the Western media. 2011 (km), Russia blocks the sanctions against Syria. 2012 (km), the capture of Pussy Riot. 2013 (km), Putin establishes a new state-run news agency, sets the rabble-rouser Dmitry Kiselyov to the top and from now western and eastern media putter around eagerly on the world's political opinion. And then we arrive in the present. 2014 (km) crisis in Ukraine, Russia is despised by the world - and we cycle through Siberia. Our memories are full of cordial encounters. People living in one of the toughest parts of the world have shared their homes and stories with us. Two thousand miles we cycled through wilderness, its awesome size and rugged beauty has overwhelmed us every day anew. Once again, we are amazed at how different a country can be, which is believed to know how it is. 2025km, the Kolyma Highway leads into the Okhotsk Sea.

Today we cycled from the center of Magadan up to the Mask of Sorrow. A monument dedicated to the Siberian convicts. A stone face, crying human heads from the left eye. It faces the sea. First plus degrees have brought the ice in the bay to melt. Only on the eastern edge it holds on. Far out wave crests are sparkling. Seagulls are screaming. Then again silence.