London was, as usual, just a waypoint on my travels, this time a staging post between the cold drabness of Saltburn and the sultry laziness of Bali. It would not be the most disappointing fact about my life if I never had to live in London again, but visiting for a few days at a time is perfectly acceptable, the chance to sightsee the areas I deliberately avoided when I was a resident in the '90s and to catch up with assorted friends. The city appals me in several different ways. The sheer cost of everything is an affront, not just because of lingering memories of my Asian travels, but even if America or Australia are involved in the comparison. The infrastructure was developed just too early in the history of technology so that a decent ... read more

Another year of travelling and another trip back home for Christmas. Feel free to join me in February for further travels. First stop - Ubud and a reunion with LA Woman.... read more

The radio on the train to St Petersburg played "Rasputin", an apposite song given my next destination but also a reminder that a worryingly large chunk of my knowledge of Russian history came from Boney M lyrics. I quickly turned to the appropriate section of the TSH, keen to learn something about the man and the times he lived in other than that "to Moscow chicks he was such a lovely dear". St Petersburg's metro still runs on a quaint token system like Boston's, but the imposing safety doors between the train and the platform make it difficult for the novice user to figure out which station they're at. I took my guidebook's advice to simply count the stops. Emerging onto Nevsky Prospekt (the city's main artery), I was immediately reminded of London by the abundance ... read more

With the Russian rail network covering some 8 time zones, the least confusing option available to the railway administrators was to pretend only Moscow Time existed, so timetables are all in Moscow Time and the fiction even extends to station clocks throughout the country. Thus it was disconcerting to drag my bags to Irkutsk station with evening pretty much nigh but the station clock was proclaiming it was just after midday. My sole cabin-mate on the overnight train to Krasnoyarsk was an older gentleman who slurped his tea, snored, and kept indicating he either had just vomited or was about to, with constant visits to the bathroom. Fortunately the vomit situation was never in the present tense. The TSH informed me that, during the journey, we passed within 1,000km of the location of the Tunguska Event ... read more

One taste I've acquired over the last couple of years has been a love of train travel, with ~5,000 miles on the Indian network no doubt having been the catalyst. As a way of getting from A to B in comfort, with a continuous unfolding of the landscape in between and the chance to meet local people in a neutral environment, trains reign supreme. So a flight home from Beijing was never going to recommend itself when a good chunk of the distance could be covered on the Trans-Siberian railway. The Trans-Siberian is more a collection of routes rather than individual trains. The 3 main routes are the Trans-Mongolian (Moscow - Beijing via Mongolia), the Trans-Manchurian (Moscow-Beijing but skirting Mongolia to the north and east), and the true Trans-Siberian (Moscow-Vladivostok). Heading east from Moscow, these routes ... read more