Imagine fifty horseback riders from the wilds of Kyrgyzstan, drunk on adrenaline and fermented horse milk. Imagine a 500m pitch on a mountain slope strewn with boulders, bushes and ditches. Imagine the carcass of a goat, deprived of its head and limbs, in a circle in the middle of the pitch. Imagine the shout that signals the beginning of the game and the stampede that follows; the yelling, the furious whipping of horses, the thunder of two hundred hooves on the mountanside as everyone gallops towards the carcass. Picture the ensuing chaos, the broken bones, black eyes and fat lips as all fifty fight to get near the goat in a horseback mosh pit, those who succeed swinging down from their saddle in an attempt to pick the dead animal up from the ground. Imagine the ... read more

Six hours on a train whose rock-solid seats were shaped roughly halfway between an L and a ... read more

It only finally sinks in that the caffeine-powered, money-worshipping, mind-conditioning world of early starts, late finishes, lost weekends and unpayable sleep debts is really being left behind when I wake up to the chug, chug, chug of the Moscow - Perm train's wheels. After a year at the grindstone I am finally back on the road. The train has yet to wake up. At the ungodly hour of six o'clock I side-step and duck limbs dangling from the ends of their bunks on my way down the peaceful, snoring aisle to the toilet. The train has no air-conditioning and is so swelteringly hot that yesterday all the men and even some of the women were wearing little more than underwear. Thankfully I am on a top bunk next to an open window through which cold, fresh ... read more

Komsomolsk, a Russian city of 250,000 on the same longitude as Japan but much further North, so unknown I had to put in a special request to TravelBlog to get it added to its list of locations. "Look at it - God forgot this place," Misha told me as we trudged shivering through the gentle mid-May snow towards the bus station, me in a pair of yellow plastic sandals: my boots were still wet from falling into a patch of semi-melted ice on Lake Baikal, three days and half the world away. "What do you mean?" I asked, falsely. "You know what I mean," he replied. Of course I knew. No one was meant to live here other than the indigenous nomads who had adapted to the extreme climate over milenia and who had been consumed ... read more

The tiny, rickety old bus ground to a halt after a 40km spin on a bumpy, pot-holed road that wound its way through taiga forests and in between mountains to the fishing village of Baikalskoe on the northern shores of Baikal, the world's largest freshwater lake. Only myself, two babushkas and a teenage girl had been on the bus that had left Severobaikalsk at 8am. A few more people seemed to be getting on here for the return journey but it would still be far from full. The inhabitants' faces were noticeably more weathered by alcohol and the elements than people in Severobaikalsk, their clothes plainer and older. I got off the bus and stepped around a burly man in terminally faded camouflage gear, his perhaps half-Buryat face red, lined and covered in stubble, who was ... read more