Seven prisoners sneak through the wire one night and head south, toward Lake Baikal.

NEWYORKER: Miles To Go

Staying on Olkhon Island, in the middle of Lake Baikal in Eastern Siberia, Simon went to look up the local museum curator.

BBC: Postcards from Russia

Precisely on time, the train gave a shiver and started moving into the countryside, chugging around the southern end of Lake Baikal.

WSJ: Riding the Trans-Mongolian Railway through Russia, China and Mongolia

The principle of underwater neutrino detection has already been tested in a small experiment at Lake Baikal in Siberia, so it is known to work.

ECONOMIST: Neutrino astronomy

Every summer, local and foreign volunteers converge on Lake Baikal, the oldest, deepest and largest lake on Earth, to signpost and improve the hiking trails that skirt the water.

BBC: A train to nowhere in Siberia

Within a few days, services swing round the brilliant blue waters of Lake Baikal, before plunging southward into the gently sloping grasslands of the Mongolian steppe, dotted with yurts and grazing horses.

BBC: Five unforgettable rail journeys

With an area of 15, 000 square km and with depths reaching more than 800m, Lake Vostok is similar in size to Lake Baikal in Siberia or Lake Ontario in North America.

BBC: Antarctic Lake Vostok yields 'new bacterial life'

The scenery, mostly taiga forest, can be monotonous, and there is a handful of worthy stops like the unreal Lake Baikal to break the trip - and to take a real shower.

BBC: Riding the virtual Trans-Siberian

As he proceeds from Moscow to Murmansk, to the Volga, then across the Urals to Turochak on the edge of the Altai mountains and from there to Lake Baikal, Yakutsk and Kamchatka, Mr Montaigne discovers that as the Russian state disintegrates, more and more people are making a living from poaching.

ECONOMIST: Exotic sports: A new angle on Russia��s crisis | The