Well it is currently thursday (20th Nov) and we are in Beijing for a few more days yet before joining our tour of the rest of China on Sunday (we have 3 days in Beijing included in that as well). I thought I better bring you all up to date though as we have been up to so much. Well, on the train from Ulaanbaatar from beijing we were joined in our cabin by a guy from Hong Kong called Paul who had been in New York studying......Architecture! So you can imagine ...

Hi everyone, Sorry it has been a while since I last did a blog entry....we have been up to so much that its a rather daunting task and also finding enough time to sit down and recall the past week or so's events has been hard! Well since my last entry we left Irkutsk and got the train to Ulaanbaatar in Mongolia. This time the train was quite empty and we got a cabin to ourselves. The usual activities of cards, eating and sleeping went on but it was a painfu...

This has been our longest train journey yet between Ekaterinburg and Irkutsk at nearly 2.5 days. It raced past though, especially as I was reading Ewan and Charley's Long Way Round. I am such a convert, as they visited Mongolia and parts of Russia and I could really relate to a lot of things they say. We shared our cabin with an old-ish Russian guy who kept himself to himself a lot of the time. On the last night on the train however we were joined by a Norweg...

Following our stay in Moscow we got the train to Ekaterinburg. The technical terms of the stretch of the journey is the Ural line, as we pass the Ural Mountains. On the train this time I was on one of the top bunks. The other person in our carriage turned out to be a young Russian about our age, but he couldn't speak a word of English. We tried to communicate via pictures and guide books but it didn't really work and he clearly looked un-inpressed! In the ...

Trans-Siberian Tour: Hello all.....well the tran-siberian tour started in Moscow. We had a free morning on the tuesday before transferring to the hotel, so we decided to get up early and go and see the Lenin Mausoleum as it is only open in the mornings and we had heard queues can be really long. On the way there we walked through Red Square (en route) and I got stopped by a russian girl dressed head to toe in white. This included knee high PVC white boots and...