If you are not one of our family and friends, we would be really interested to know how you found our blog - please email us at olarse@hotmail.com - many thanks! (N) We left central Vietnam on Thurs 22nd Nov in the same weather that we entered it, i.e heavy rain. The 24 hour bus journey to Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) could have been worse, but we managed a reasonable amount of sleep overnight and travelled throughout the day, arriving 26 hours later at around 7pm. The scenery during the day consisted of a combination of beach and waves when [View Full Entry]

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(P) Vietnam’s political capital from 1802 to 1945 and UNESCO-recognised, the city of Hue is home to the grandiose tombs of several emperors from the Nguyen Dynasty and a Citadel, the former royal complex. Hue was a true washout, but of course that did not dissuade us from venturing out to explore, donned in our fetching ponchos. Actually, when when we got outside everyone else looked equally ridiculous in their long flowing plastic robes in assorted colours. We had been warned whilst still in Hanoi about the floods in central Vietnam - typhoons are common every yea [View Full Entry]

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(N) "The railroad is the chief of many mechanical devices enabling us to get away from where we are to where we are no better off". So said Ambrose Bierce, the American newspaper columnist, satirist, short-story writer and novelist, who disappeared in the early 20th century Mexican Revolution, in his book The Devils Dictionary. Anyway, the reason for including that quote is that I would still have been happy, after our own railroad journey between Hong Kong and Vietnam, if I was no better off in Hanoi than I had been in Hong Kong, where we had eaten, drank and sightseen [View Full Entry]

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If you are not one of our family and friends, we would be really interested to know how you found our blog - please email us at olarse@hotmail.com - many thanks! (P) Leaving mainland China behind us, we hopped off the overnight train and strolled across the border to Hong Kong. Setting foot there brought back memories of the great time I had during my first visit, with my aunt Gerry and uncle Yoshiji many moons ago! What first struck us this time was that everything was SO CLEAN! Trains are food- and drink-free zones and stations encourage order and cleanliness [View Full Entry]

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(N) It struck me as ironic one morning, while I was lying down in the bunk reading my book "The Old Patagonian Express" - in which Paul Theroux was describing his train journey from Boston USA down to Chile's Patagonia - that southern China was passing me by outside the compartment window above my head, like a big filmstrip. So I put down my book and pulled back the curtain. It was 10a.m. after all, and the Chinese passengers had been up for hours. There were fields visible in every direction, with large hills marking the boundaries of what you could [View Full Entry]

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If you are not one of our family and friends, we would be really interested to know how you found our blog - please email us at olarse@hotmail.com - many thanks! (P) We bussed 3 hours from Bejing to the Great Wall, quite comfortable in the bus reading and dozing and could've stayed were it not for the impending trek along the Wall itself. T'would have been rude not to give it a go... We set off eastwards from Jinshanling to Simatai, one of the few parts to retain the Great Wall's original features when it was restored in the Ming [View Full Entry]

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If you are not one of our family and friends, we would be really interested to know how you found our blog - please email us at olarse@hotmail.com - many thanks! (N) Thurs 4th Oct - in the wee hours, we visited a genuine Mongolian disco! We had been looking for a jazz club, but it was the disco that we had stumbled across, or nothing. As the only 'white' faces, it was not long before our group was being almost dragged onto the dancefloor, and cultural exchange took place through the medium of dance. We had a pre-7am departure on [View Full Entry]

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(P) Arrived in Irkutsk (Siberia), having been transported across 5 time zones on our 3-day train journey from Moscow. Said our farewells to Anya & Tatiana, our trusty Russian carriage ‘mothers’ who made us feel very much at homewith their smiles, kind words (well, they sounded kind anyway), vacuuming our cabins 3 times a day (!) and ushering us to bed in the early hours… On solid ground, the temperature gauge showing 0 degrees gave us a clue that this really was Siberia, but fortunately after a bus ride to our chalet on the shores of Lake Baikal the sun was [View Full Entry]

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(N) Vodka Train, in which our accommodation and transport have been prepaid, and there is a local contact (called a honcho!) in each place to take us around]. New feature! See Paula's Moscow video diary! Thurs 20th & Fri 21st Sept We arrived exactly to timetable at 08h00 in Moscow on the overnight train from SPB. That morning we popped in to visit the luxurious Yeliseyev's grand grocery store, and also saw the mayor's building, which was one of many to have been physically ROLLED BACK some [View Full Entry]

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(P) 13 September Up at 3 a.m. (having gone to sleep at 1.30) for the 06h00 flight from Liverpool to Riga in Latvia. Unsurprisingly slept until we touched down. Riga is a city we are on familiar terms with, having inter-railed there in 2001, so we enjoyed checking out the old haunts. Over dinner Nick had a Adaris beer (reminding him of John Aldridge, so he says). 14th - 19th September Having caught up on sleep, we brunched and did a DIY walking tour of the Old Town. Wandered in to the former aircraft hangar food market and bussed overnight to [View Full Entry]

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