Sometimes you end up at a destination and think "what should I do next?" and Ulan-Ude was just that sort of place although as we discovered there was not really an answer to that question - it was not the most exciting stopping off point of the trip! Given our early arrival after the short trip from Irkutsk we dropped our bags off at the hotel, had a coffee, walked around the place, had another coffee back at the hotel before having lunch and then checked in for ...

Irkutsk is another huge city and is the stepping off point for a visit to Lake Baikal. The city itself, from memory, was pleasant enough with lots of impressive buildings both old and new and of course the occasional statue - it would not be Russia otherwise. In Irkutsk the temperature was hot with the thermometer hitting the 30°c mark as I recall and this lulled us into a false sense of security as we headed to Lake Baikal by shared mini bus. Lake Baikal is...

The trip from Novosibirsk to Krasnoyarsk was a fairly short trip on the Trans Siberian route at just 473 miles. The actual Trans Siberian Express or the Rossiya to give it the official name (Train No 2 running east bound) is one train that does the entire journey from Moscow to Vladivostok every other day and takes seven days/six nights to do the trip end to end. Wiith us hopping on and off different trains as we journey eastwards we only ever travelled on Trai...

Novosibirsk is a big city plonked pretty much in the middle of nowhere with around 1.5 million people living here in Western Siberia. Fortunately for us the Congress Hotel was just a few hundred metres walk from the railway station which is one of the largest in Russia so after a night on the train it was not too far to drag our bags. When planning the journey across Russia it was always difficult trying to balance the amount of time spent travelling on the trai...

Arriving into Yekatrinburg (or Ekatrinburg) saw us cross into Asia as we passed through the Ural Mountains although I must admit that I do not really remember seeing any mountains. Yekatrinburg has the dubious honour of being the place where Nicholas II, the last Russian Tsar, and his family were shot during the Russian Civil War in July 1918. The Church on the Blood was built on the spot where this happened although the church is actually very modern having onl...