Take the train, not a plane. I’d spent most of the night acutely aware of every bump in the rails, every bridge, every station; it was the beginning of a very long rail journey that would ultimately take me to Vietnam and the train...
The Bangkok to Butterworth Train: The International Express from Thailand to Malaysia. Penang: it is one of my favourite places on earth. This small island in the north-western coast of peninsula Malaysia is a melting pot of culture; feed your eyes, your belly and your...
More than most other forms of transport, the train immerses the traveller into the country it crosses. A slow train can be a window into the lives of the people and an expression of how the country works. The Myanmar rail network is all this,...
Ulaanbaatar After our little adventure around the wide open spaces of the Gobi desert it felt strange to be confined in chaotic, noisy Ulaanbaatar. In the two full days left in Mongolia we saw an excellent cultural show, with traditional throat singing, I had and...
We certainly arrived in Ulaanbaatar on an auspicious day. At 5am, all bleary-eyed, we stepped off the train from Russia in to the shivering darkness of a Mongolian morning and were informed it was a national holiday. It was Chinggis Khan’s birthday. The train, number...
Crossing Siberia by Train The pleasure of standing in the corridor of a sleeper carriage watching the world pass by the window is one of the reasons I adore long distance train travel, being rocked to sleep by the rails, I could rhapsodize forever. For...
We were finally on our way to Russia, on the Vilnius to St Petersburg sleeper train. I had booked the tickets though the agency we had arranged our visas with, Real Russia, so it was no surprise to find that the other two passengers in...
On the Jan Kiepura Sleeper Train from Cologne to Warsaw, I had just drifted off in our cabin when there was a knock on the door. The train had pulled into a station somewhere in deepest Germany and we were joined by another passenger. After this...
On Thursday 10th October we departed London St Pancras on the Eurostar bound for Brussels. The aim of this adventure is to travel from the UK to Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam entirely by train. This was our first leg, heading to Poland. We...
Now the adventure really began, we had arrived in Syria…… So I’ll pick up where I left off: Travelling from Istanbul to Aleppo on the Toros Express Train. We had crossed the Turkey/Syria border with no problem. We hadn’t even had to leave the train,...
In January 2008 we embarked on a grand adventure around the globe, a trip that would see us to far off lands and the exotic places I dreamed of. In any trip you have to begin somewhere, we chose Istanbul, on the edge of Europe....
