The Anthem Philatelist

Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia was the venue for the Hepatitis C and Co-infections conference which I attended together with two other gastroenterologists from Cebu, Dr. Arlene Kuan and Dr. Jenny Limquiaco. While reviewing the world map (which I always do before travelling), I can see that China was below Mongolia while Russia was above it. “I’d love a side trip to the Asian side of Russia”, I told my wife.  The city of Ulan-Ude, one of Russian Siberia’s major cities was just an hour and 15 minutes by plane from Mongolia. Siberia conjures images of a perpetually cold and dreary place where prisoners and outcasts were exiled like in the movie Gulag, a Russian forced labor camp, which I have watched a few times during my childhood. This movie has somehow imprinted this scene in my mind. Is this the kind place I would want go? Tick encephalitis, Lyme disease, Hepatitis A were some of the diseases one might acquire while traveling to Siberia, I am warned by The Lonely Planet guidebo...

As the vast evergreen forests of Russia 's Siberian taiga extend southward toward Mongolia , the ground rises and the terrain becomes more varied. The border between Siberian Russia and Mongolia is a natural divide here, with rugged hills and mountains forming series of wrinkles between the sprawling Russian forests to the north and rolling grasslands to the south.    About midway along this border, in a gigantic stone bowl nearly four hundred miles (636 km) long and almost fifty miles (80 km) wide, lies almost one quarter of the all the fresh water on earth--Lake Baikal.    Baikal is easily the largest lake in Eurasia , and it is just as easily the deepest lake in the world (1,620 metres). On the merits of magnitude alone the lake is renowned as one of the earth's most impressive natural wonders, and rightfully so--Baikal is so large that all of the rivers on earth combined would take an entire year to fill it. What fewer people realize, however, ...