Beijing to St. Petersburg - The final leg....
Greetings to you all!
I hope you are all healthy and fit. Well, Lynn and I are now back in England. Our tremendous year on the road has, sadly, come to an end and we're now back in the land of mortgages, pensions and bills... how thoroughly depressing it all is!
Anyway, sincere apologies for not writing this last episode sooner. I could give you 101 excuses as to why I haven't done it but I'll give you just the one and a damn fine one it is too. Excuse No. 1 for not writing sooner: We had no internet connection. See, I told you it was good. Now we've got Broadband installed though my excuses have dried up and so here I am, back at the computer, about to embark on a lengthy bit of typing so you can finally read about the last 12 days of the trip. Read on my friends...
On Tuedsday 7th February we wake early and pack the last of our stuff. At 06:40 we have to be at the Beijing Central Train Station for a 07:40 departure to Moscow. Most of our packing involves sorting out the food. We take it out of the fridge ie. off the windowsill outside, and share it out evenly between us to carry. Our main concern is the supposedly strictly-enforced 35kg weight limit for train passenger's baggage. Our 'big' packs weigh about 20kg each and our camera bags are about 7kg. Then there's our daypacks which are full of books so they're atleast 5 or 6kg too. So we're virtually on the 35kg weight limit before we even pick up the food bags. In an effort to beat the weight limit we purposely buy no drinks. Our plan is to get on the train with all our stuff then I'll nip back out into the station melée and purchase as many bottles of mineral water and pop as I can carry from the platform kiosks. The company we booked our train tickets with told us that we probably won't get asked to put our bags on the scales anyway as long as when we go through we don't look like we're struggling to carry them. Round the corner we do a few 'pre-bag-inspection' deep breaths and stretching exercises and then we haul everything up off the ground and stagger through to the platform, tickets clamped firmly between our teeth and giving our best "Heavy? Nah, hardly anything in 'em!" faces to the inspectors.
Our carriage is No. 14 out of 16 and is situated 500 miles down the platform somewhere not far from the Mongolian border which we're due to cross this evening. We are in cabin 2, berths 5 and 6. The other 2 berths in our cabin are shared by 2 Mongolian chaps about the same age as us. One tells us that he's been living in Washington DC in the U.S. for the last 8 years and is returning home to Ulan Baatar in Mongolia because he misses his family. The other guy is his friend who he met in Beijing and who doesn't speak any English. They seem nice and friendly though and it's good to have someone in our cabin who we can talk to.
We leave on time at 07:40 and head off towards Mongolia full of excitement at the coming journey. Our cabin is quite nice. The beds are comfy and the linen clean and pressed. On the floor there's a nice rug and a small vase of flowers on the table. Under each bottom bunk there is a storage box which is half the length of the bed and all our valuables go in there. It can only be accessed by lifting up the hinged bunk bed itself which acts as the lid so it's a great idea as it means no one can have a rummage through your stuff when you're asleep. At the end of each carriage there's a toilet and washroom and next to this is the guard's room as each carriage has its own guard. There is also a big water boiler by the guards room which is kept full of boiling water at all times so you have instant hot water to make a tea or coffee or some noodles 24 hours a day.
Ninety minutes into the journey we pass under the Great Wall of China at Badaling but we're all too busy nattering and don't realise we've missed it until it's too late. We saw the odd patch of snow in Beijing but not a great deal but by midday snow covers everything and not long after that it's snowing quite heavily as we trundle through the countryside. At 13:00 the guard comes round to give us a free-meal voucher each for the dining-car and to inspect our tickets and passports to make sure everything is in order for this evening's border crossing. I notice that the Mongolian chap who has spent the last 8 years in America entered the U.S. in January 1999 on a 3-month tourist visa and doesn't have an exit stamp. So it looks like he has been working there illegally and his return to Mongolia has probably got more to do with being forced to than he's led us to believe. The dining-car is 4 carriages away from ours towards the front of the train so I nip down there to grab our lunches which they will pack into plastic containers take-away style so we can eat them in our cabin if we want. As you make your way between 2 carriages you have to open 2 sets of double doors and as you open the middle 2 separating each carriage you are hit in the face by an icy blast of air and a face full of snow. You don't actually go outside between carriages but there are gaps between the panels and snow is being blown through these rather vigorously. Infact, even though it's only been snowing for the last hour, there's already a centimetre of snow on the floor in each of these icy cubicles!
At 20:40, 13 hours on from Beijing, we pull into Erlian where the Chinese border formalities are carried out. Our passports are collected and taken away and then we have a choice of spending 3 hours on the train or 3 hours in the station building. The Mongolian chaps get off but Lynn and I decide to stay on the train and not only because we're comfortable and warm but also because we want to witness one of the most incredible railway engineering feats. You see, to stop Western forces invading Russia along the railways, Russia decided to adopt a different line gauge to the rest of the world so nobody else's trains would fit the tracks. As a result, Russian lines are 10cm wider than Europe's, or indeed China's, lines. Mongolia's railway lines were laid by the Russians so they operate on the Russian gauge which is why at the Chinese/Mongolian border we are backed up into a big rail-shed and then in turn each carriage is hoisted off the ground by a giant crane arm, Chinese wheels are disconnected, Russian ones slotted into place and then we are shifted across and placed gently down on top of slightly wider Russian rails. It takes 3 hours and for obvious reasons - like the fact that you're dangling in the air - you cannot get off and all toilet facilities are out of bounds lest some poor unfortunate mechanic gets a face full of wee whilst he's busy underneath with his wrench!
Once we're finished, we're backed out onto a different platform, anyone who got off can get on again, passports are returned complete with fresh Chinese exit stamps, a new Russian locomotive is attached and then finally we're on our way again. The two Mongolian guys have been to the Duty-free shop and return with half-a-dozen bottles of Russian vodka and Chinese whiskey. The whiskey bottles make me laugh - they are exactly the same as "Grant's Whiskey" except for two small details. One they taste like shit and two they're called "Grunt's Whiskey". Otherwise the bottle, packaging and design are an exact replica. The vodka is 80% proof and could melt through an engine block given 30 minutes and half a chance. As guests in Mongolia, Lynn and I are each poured a "Mongolian Shot" or translated that's 3/4 of a mug to you and I. A short while later and we pull into Dzamyn Ude where the Mongolian entry formalities are done. Again our passports go off and two hours later they're returned and we set off again. By this time it's 02:20 in the morning, Lynn and I have begrudgingly accepted a 2nd "Mongolian shot" of paint stripper and the other guys have polished off the rest of the litre bottle between them and cracked open a second. Lynn and I get into bed and try really really hard to get some sleep whilst the other two do their utmost to change our minds from thinking that they're decent fellows... It doesn't take them long.
I dozed for a little while whilst the second bottle of vodka is finished and one of the guys has thrown up not once, but twice. The first time was all over the rug and the second time was all over the bottom half of Lynn's bed (and she was on the top bunk too!).
At 04:30 I am woken up for the final time by severe whimperings from the bed opposite as the English-speaking Mongolian starts dribbling all over himself and then crying before violently kicking his own bed, falling straight back into it and then passing out only to start snoring in almighty roaring spasms everyone 30 seconds or so. At 06:30, realising that no more sleep is coming my way, I get up. A little while later Lynn also gets up and a little while after this our two drunken friends surface too. They are still absolutely blind-drunk and stagger about all over the place and make a dreadful attempt at pouring coffee for themselves but successfully manage only to cover both themselves and the cabin in coffee powder, milk and boiling water. At 10:00 they head off to the dining-car for breakfast. Lynn and I refuse to join them as, in their drunken state, they have made it blatently obvious that one of them was going to head off to the toilet on the way and then come back and have a little look through our bags before joining up with us again in the dining-car. I say it was obvious because they were actually arguing about which one of them should go to the toilet and which one of them would stay with us!
After 30 minutes of doing their best to get us to leave the cabin, they give up and head to the dining-car alone and Lynn and I finally get an hour of peace and quiet to enjoy the wonderful views of the snow-covered Gobi desert and the rolling hillsides of southern Mongolia. After an hour our unwelcome room-mates return and it looks like breakfast was of the alcoholic variety. We wouldn't have believed it possible before they left but they are actually far more inebriated than when they left an hour ago. Yesterday's duty-free "Grunt's" which we were told in more sober moments were presents for friends and family are pulled out and splashed into mugs still containing the remnants of the earlier attempt to make coffee. It's 2 hours until we get to Ulan Baatar - their stop - and the time just can't go quickly enough. They both go through stages where they are on the verge of throwing up again, cupping their mouthes and wiping their eyes - heads bent over between their legs as they fight back the urge to be sick whilst suffering the drunken taunts of the other. We try to get them to stop drinking but they are egging each other on to finish a bottle each before they get off.
We arrive at Ulan Baatar on-time at 13:15. It's a 30 minute stop but they are so engrossed in their drinking competition that they barely realise and Lynn and I have to practically kick them out of the cabin to get them to leave. Finally though they're out and we can breathe a huge sigh of relief. In the final moments the English-speaking one was trying to get us to go out onto the platform with him "to say goodbye whilst my friend will bring all the bags in a moment". They probably thought it was a brilliant and cunning final plan to get us to leave our posessions alone for 5 minutes but to anyone who hadn't downed 2 litres of spirits in the last 12 hours it was painfully obvious what their thinking was.
Finally we're rid of them though and for the final 10 minutes at the station we sit and wonder who our next cabin buddies are going to be. To our surprise and relief we find that we have it all to ourselves, atleast for a further 3 hours until the next station. After we depart we clean up the place and then settle down for some much-needed quiet time. Eight hours later at 21:00 we are still on our own as we reach the town of Sukhebaatar which, with a population of 23,700 is the third largest settlement in Mongolia, a country the size of Western Europe! Sukhebaatar is almost on the Russian border so the Mongolian exit formalities are done here. It takes just over an hour and then we depart again. An hour later and we stop at Naushki, the first town in Russia and the place for Russian border formalities. From this station onwards everything runs on Moscow-time which is 5 hours behind our present location so according to the station clock it's now only 18:15 when we get here but outside of the station it's actually 23:15!
We had been led to believe the Mongolian/Russian border crossing was a very strict and cheerless affair, especially on the Russian side but we found the Russian officials to be some of the friendliest border guards we've encountered in the last year. We were greeted with a smile and a "Hello" whereas in most places they seem to struggle to even acknowledge your presence most of the time. One soldier helped us with the customs declaration by filling it in for us because it was all in Russian on one side and Chinese on the other and we didn't have a clue! A dog-handler comes by checking for drugs and a very stern woman comes in looking for illegal immigrants. At 01:30 (20:30 MT) our passports are returned and even though we're supposed to stay up until we depart which is still a further 90 minutes away we are absolutely shattered.
"They'll wake us if they want us again", I tell Lynn before locking the cabin door, turning off the lights and climbing into bed. Luckily they don't and when we wake up the next morning we feel much more refreshed.
It's now Day 3 of our Trans-Mongolian journey and we pull into the city of Ulan-Ude at 07:15 (02:15 MT) for a 15 minute stop. I am already sat waiting with my coat and hat on as we pull into the station as I plan to find an ATM, get out some rubles and get back again before the train leaves. My thinking is that there's bound to be an ATM somewhere in the station, it's just a case of finding it in time! It's about -10C outside as I jump down onto the platform and there's about 15cm of snow on the ground. I dash up the metal steps of the bridge as fast as the slippery conditions will allow me, across the length of it and down again into the station building. I eventually find the ATM machine after a couple of minutes searching but there's only 1 problem, I'm the 11th person in the queue. I can't believe it, I look at my watch, 10 minutes to get back so 8 to be on the safe side. I'll never get to the machine in 8 minutes. I wait a couple of minutes just to see but in the end give up and return to the train empty-handed. It's not a big deal, we have plenty of "snacky" things we can eat and US$40 which we can probably use in the dining-car atleast. I can try again in the city of Irkutsk when we get there later in the afternoon. The scenery is beautiful - lots of pine trees and silver birch and miles and miles of endless snow. It's also a clear and sunny day with a bright, blue sky. Mid-morning we spot a black bear bounding through the snow away from us towards the trees. It's quite far away but still unmistakedly a bear.
At about 11:00 (06:00 MT) we draw alongside Lake Baikal which is both the largest and deepest freshwater lake in the world. We make friends with a Russian family in the cabin next to ours who joined the train in Mongolia and are travelling back to Moscow. They work in the Moscow Circus. He is a clown and she works as a masseuse for the entertainers. They also have their daughter with them who's about 7 or 8 years old. Next door to them is a little old lady who turns out to be a tiger trainer! She showed us her photo album of herself working with the tigers!
After following the shores of Lake Baikal for 207km the railway line continues west towards Moscow whilst the lake starts to turn north. An hour behind schedule we arrive at the city of Irkutsk, 65km west of Lake Baikal. It's supposed to be a 20 minute stop but because we're an hour late I really don't know how long we've got. Anyway, I head off to find an ATM again. I find one within the station building again, withdraw 1,000 rubles (which is about 20 squids) and leg it back to the train. It took 8 minutes and we left after 15 so I had plenty of time, I just didn't know that! We are still on our own in the cabin ever since the two drunks got off in Ulan Baatar which is great as it gives us more room to spread out.
At 20:00 I decide to head down to the dining-car with my newly withdrawn rubles and get us some hot lunch. We haven't had a decent hot meal for 2 days now so we could do with some "proper food". I head down towards the front of the train as before but when I get to the 4th carriage there's no dining-car, just another set of sleeping berths. Where on earth has the dining-car gone? I end up going the entire length of the 11 carriages to get to the one nearest the locomotive but there is definately NO dining-car. I make my way back to our carriage and pass through uttering a brief "Checking at the back..." to a bemused Lynn and carry on towards the rear. The very last carriage is now the dining-car but it's closed. Bugger.
I head back and tell Lynn and then we set about finding something to eat in our snack bag. We eventually settle for pizza but not the sort you've probably ever had before. This was an improvised one which we named "Trans-Siberian Pizza". It consists of a Ritz cracker with Laughing Cow cheese smeared on it and then a slice of pepperoni on top. Voila! Pepperoni pizza.
Day 4 and at 07:45 (03:45 MT - we passed through a time-zone in the night) we pull into the city of Krasnoyarsk. I nipped out to the shop and bought some fried onion - bread rolls and some orange juice. We lavish thick scrapings of Vegemite on the onion bread rolls and have them for breakfast, lovely!
At 13:00 I decide to try the dining-car again. I head towards the rear of the train first as it's much closer and I'm pleased to find the dining-car in the same place I left it yesterday. Unfortunately, it's also closed just like yesterday too. There are 3 men smoking at one of the tables and one of them waves an oily hand and a screw-driver towards the direction of the kitchen and says one word - "Kaput". Bugger again.
At 14:00 we stop off at Marinsk and so I nip out yet again for bread, cheese and salami. In the afternoon it starts to snow really heavily. The snow is so deep here already, the only evidence of cars in some driveways is an aerial poking out of the snow or the faint outline of the roof through the snowdrift. Some houses have snowdrifts all the way up their sides to the roof! We pass a number of snowplough- trains as we progress through this region.
At 18:30 (15:30 MT) we reach Novosibirsk and another time-zone change. For the seventh time in 2 days I don my woollies and leave the train - I'm bloody knackered with all this running about! I return with a big bag of pies, a loaf of bread and some giant pot noodles. That should keep us going until Moscow now as we've entirely lost hope of the dining-car being open anymore.
Day 5 and we wake up to yet another time-zone change. It was freezing in the cabin last night and as I open the blind to peer out of the window I am confronted by a wall of ice. A quick touch confirms why it looks like it's on the inside - it is. Still, it was luxury compared to next door where they have a wall of ice AND 3cm of snow on their window ledge! During the night we passed to within 80km of the Kazakhstan/Russia border when we went through the city of Omsk.
At 13:45 we stop off at Yekaterinburg but for once I don't need to get off as we have a giant bucket of noodles each for dinner. Not long after Yekaterinburg we pass a white obelisk sticking out of the snow. It announces that we have now left Asia and entered Europe.
By 19:00 (17:00 MT) we're both knackered and ready for bed. It doesn't help that we've done two 26 hour days in a row. Yesterday it was 21:00 at this time and the day before it was 23:00. I don't know whether to have breakfast, have lunch, have dinner, go to bed or get up anymore! We try to sit it out for a bit longer but it's no use and by 20:00 we're in bed fast asleep.
Day 6: Monday 12th February, 2007 - Yet again we have ice on the inside of the window but strangely it doesn't feel so cold in here today. I can't believe we've had the cabin all to ourselves ever since Ulan Baatar - still, I think it's the least we deserved after putting up with those two drunken halfwits on the first night! We polish off the last of the food at lunch-time and a short while later at 14:30 (14:30MT!) we arrive at Yaroslavsky Station in Moscow. As part of the train package we bought from 'Monkey Business' in Beijing we have someone to meet us at the end of the platform and take us to the hotel. We have 2 nights at the Arbis Hotel. It's a 3 star hotel and costs nearly 80 squid a night between us but it's not as nice as our City Central Hostel room in Beijing. Luxury compared to an icy railway carriage though!
We have 2 full days in Moscow and so after breakfast we buy a couple of Metro tickets and head for Red Square. The first thing we do is head to Lenin's Mausoleum - so that's waxy, dead Communist leader No. 3 we've seen now in the space of 6 weeks! Lenin died in 1935 so he's been dead a while but despite this he's still in better condition than dog-eared Chairman Mao!
After seeing Lenin we head over to St. Basil's Cathedral. If there's one structure that to me is synonymous with Russia then it's St. Basil's Cathedral. This fairytale castle with it's colourful onion-shaped dome roofs is to Moscow what the Eiffel Tower is to Paris. It's magnificent and I take a number of photos before we head inside. The inside, I have to say, is not what I expected. There is no single, giant amphitheatre like in most churches. Instead, it's as if each tower has been built separately and then a little doorway knocked into one to connect them all together. So what you get is a number of small, dark rooms connected by unlit, tiny corridors and stairwells. Very strange - I think I prefer the outside!
The next day we head to the Kremlin where we spend half a day. Many of the buildings inside this walled fortress are off-limits to the general public so maybe only a third of the site is visitable. We had a wander around the permitted areas and inside the various museums and churches... yawn, yawn. We saw the Tsar's Cannon which is the largest cannon in the world although it's never been fired so nobody knows if it actually works or not. We also saw the Tsar's Bell which, at 200 tonnes, is also the largest bell in the world. In 1737 there was a fire here and in the inferno a piece of the bell broke off. It must have been one hell of a blaze!
After we left the Kremlin we headed to Sculpture Park where, after the break-up of the U.S.S.R., all the statues of the former Soviet leaders were dumped. We took a number of photos of the likes of Lenin and Stalin but most of the stuff was buried under great drifts of snow.
At 22:30 we take a taxi to Leningradsky Station and at 23:55 we leave Moscow on the overnight express to St. Petersburg.
We arrived at St. Petersburg at 07:55 on Thursday 15th February and were met at the end of the platform by a former work-colleague of mine, Phil. He had decided to join us for the last 3 days of the trip and then fly back with us to London. We take a taxi to the nearby Hotel Ergecon where we are booked in for our last 3 nights. After a spot of breakfast we decide we really ought to head out and see some sights. After all, there's less than 100 hours of the holiday remaining now!
We head to The Hermitage as our first priority. The Hermitage is reputedly the world's largest art gallery with over 3,000,000 works of art and apparently if you walked up and down each of the galleries you would have covered a staggering 25km by the end of it! Of course, it's all rather overwhelming and you'd need a week to see everything but we spent an enjoyable if tiring 4 hours there and saw all the bits we wanted to see. In the evening we went to a marvellous little Ukranian restaurant called "Shinok" where I just had to have the authentic "Chicken Kiev"!
We also visited 'The Church of the Spilled Blood', a rather gruesome name for an exceedingly pretty church. It's another typically Russian, fairytale castle-type church. Apparently the church was built on the ground where Tsar Alexander II was assasinated in 1881 hence the rather grisly name. We did a lot of shopping that day too. I succumbed to buying a big, no I mean BIG - B.I.G. furry Russian army hat. It's lovely and warm and I managed to find a nice communist hammer & sickel pin-badge to go on the front too! Lynn bought some fur-lined leather boots which are lovely too.
In the evening we went to possibly the strangest Indian restaurant in the world. It was called "Kashmir" but that was as far as the resemblance to anything remotely Indian actually went. It was a vegetarian place and most of the dishes were weird fruit salady type things with tofu on top. It wasn't horrible but, like I say, it wasn't Indian either so not at all what we were expecting.
On Saturday 17th February we visited the Peter & Paul Fortress which was rubbish, followed by the Artillery Museum which was excellent, full of some of the largest rockets and bombs you can imagine. The only disappointment was the fact that all of the information was only in Russian. From the Artillery Museum we went over to the old Russian Battle Cruiser "Aurora" which has been a museum since it was retired from the Navy in 1950. Again, it was very interesting but as Lynn so rightly put it afterwards, "I think I'm a bit militaried out after today".
Sunday 18th February, and we have to be at the airport by 14:00 to check-in for our flight to London which means by the time we've packed our bags and checked out of the hotel we've got about 3 hours left to fill before we leave. We decide to fill it with a trip to the nearby Dostoevsky Museum which was very interesting. The museum itself is in the building where Dostoevsky used to live and wrote many of his most famous books and he also died here too. Whilst we were in there it really started to snow heavily and I began to harbour thoughts that maybe all the aeroplanes in St. Petersburg would be grounded and we wouldn't be able to go home just yet but deep down I knew it wasn't going to happen - it was just wishful thinking.
As it was, we left 45 minutes late because they had to de-ice the plane before we could take-off but finally we were on our way. Three and a half hours later at 18:15 UK time we landed at Heathrow airport. We collected our baggage, entered Arrivals and Lynn's dad was there to meet us and take us home.
So there it is. One year. 15 countries.
In the past 12 months I've been to Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, The Galapagos Islands, New Zealand, Australia, India, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, China and Russia. I've sunbathed on Copacabana Beach in Rio; visited the colossal 'Christ the Redeemer' statue; stood at the top of Sugarloaf mountain; I've seen a football match at the Maracana Stadium, the world's largest with a 200,000 capacity; spent 4 days on Ilha Grnade, one of the most beautiful tropical islands in the world; travelled down the Paranagua railway line, one of the most stunning journey's in South America; got drenched at the gargantuan Iguacu Falls on the Brazilian/Argentinian border. I've been to Buenos Aires, home of the Tango; stayed on the most amazing working Estancia in gaucho country; I've walked on glaciers; trekked in the astounding Torres Del Paine National Park in Southern Chile; I've been bored out of my mind on the rain-drenched island of Chiloe off the coast of Chile. I've wandered the streets of Chile's capital, Santiago; I've sampled the wine from some of Chile's finest vineyards; I've soaked it up in the thermal baths of Mendoza, trekked through the lunar valley in the Argentine Andes; encountered the surreal rock formations of the dinosaur valley and the salt plains of Salta in Northern Argentina; I've spent 5 days in the Atacama Desert where I've sandboarded in Death Valley; Star-gazed in the world's best location for looking at the night sky; I've wandered through mud pools and thermal geysers at over 5,000 metres above sea level; I've visited the absolutely weird alien landscape of southern Bolivia with it's red and green lakes, it's vast salt lakes containing a coral island full of isolated birds and a hotel made entirely of salt; I've encountered absolute devastation when my camera was stolen from me in Uyuni and overwhelming kindness whilst trying to deal with it; I've been to Potosi, once the richest city in the world with a mountain of solid silver and La Paz the highest Capital in the world; I've mountain-biked down the world's most dangerous road; I've sailed across Lake Titicaca and stayed on the beautiful 'Island of the Sun' at it's centre; I've watched condors whoosh past me whilst standing on the edge of the world's deepest canyon; spent 3 amazing nights sleeping out in the Amazonian Rainforest; I've trekked to the seventh wonder of the world, Machu Picchu and spent nearly 2 weeks in the beautiful Inca city of Cusco; I've surfed (badly) in the Pacific and seen more Peruvian archaeological sites than most Peruvian archaeologists; I've travelled along the amazing Devil's Nose Railway in Ecuador and narrowly escaped having to flee the town of Banos which was evacuated after a volcanic eruption only 2 days after we left. I've stood on the equator and cycled down Cotopaxi Volcano; I've spent my birthday swimming with sealions in the most beautiful paradise on earth - The Galapagos Islands. I've swum with sharks, turtles, manta rays, penguins and billions of colourful fish. I've crossed the international dateline somewhere over the Pacific. I've white-water rafted down the world's highest commercially rafted waterfall; jumped out of a plane at 4,000 metres above the ground; driven the length of New Zealand in a bloody awful van; bungy-jumped from New Zealand's highest bungy at 134 metres; I've done the Lord of the Rings sights tour; narrowly missed been smashed into the canyon walls on a Jet Boat; whale-watched in Kaikoura; visited the Sydney Opera House, walked the Sydney Harbour Bridge; sunbathed on Bondi Beach; stayed at a 5 star hotel in the heart of Sydney; stayed in a crappy dorm room in the heart of Sydney; I've visited the Olympic Park and swum in the Olympic pool; I've sweated in Mumbai; sweated even more in Ahmadabad; seen more forts, palaces and temples in India than anyone else alive; visited the annual Pushkar camel fair; been tiger-spotting in India's Ranthambore National Park; visited the Deshnoke Rat Temple; the Monsoon Temple; the Red Fort; the Red Palace; the absolutely incredible Taj Mahal; I've been rowed up the Ganges in the sacred city of Varanasi, spent 2 weeks in the colonial retreat of Darjeeling in the foothills of the Himalaya; ridden the toy-train; visited a tea plantation; watched Mount Everest appear at sunrise; visited the restricted state of Sikkim and the beautiful Buddhist temples of Gangtok; survived the mayhem of Kolkata; fell in love with Bangkok; visited the Royal Palace and the enormous Reclining Buddha; been for more Thai massages than I can remember; strolled the famous night-markets and learned to cook heavenly Thai dishes. I've spent 3 days at the astounding Angkor Wat temple site in Cambodia and the sobering Killing Fields and S-21 torture prison in Phnom Penh. I've swam in the world's warmest sea in Sihanoukville and been granted the world's fastest visa while I sat and waited. I've ran the gauntlet of mopeds in Ho Chi Minh City, crawled through the Viet Cong tunnels at Cu Chi, travlled up the Vietnamese coast to the pretty town of Hoi An, caught the train to Hue and flown Business Class to Hanoi. I've swam in Halong Bay and seen the preserved bodies of Ho Chi Minh, Chairman Mao AND Lenin!; I've travelled across China by train, seen the amazing hills of Guilin, the beautiful skyscrapers of Hong Kong and the almost as beautiful skyline of Shanghai. I've entered the Forbidden City; strolled in Tianenmen Square; walked along the Great Wall of China; caught the train all the way from Beijing to Moscow across the beautiful landscape of Siberia in winter. I've visited the Kremlin; walked through Red Square; visited the fairytale church of St. Basil's Cathedral; walked through the world's largest art gallery, The Hermitage, in St. Petersburg and... and... and... spent a year doing it all. I've met so many people; made so many friends and done things that I shall savour forever more. Was it the most amazing year of my life and an experience I really will never forget as long as I live? Well, what do you think?
Thank you sincerely to everyone who has made this trip what it was. From the people we met to the people who kept in touch with us from back home. We love you all!
Rich
I hope you are all healthy and fit. Well, Lynn and I are now back in England. Our tremendous year on the road has, sadly, come to an end and we're now back in the land of mortgages, pensions and bills... how thoroughly depressing it all is!
Anyway, sincere apologies for not writing this last episode sooner. I could give you 101 excuses as to why I haven't done it but I'll give you just the one and a damn fine one it is too. Excuse No. 1 for not writing sooner: We had no internet connection. See, I told you it was good. Now we've got Broadband installed though my excuses have dried up and so here I am, back at the computer, about to embark on a lengthy bit of typing so you can finally read about the last 12 days of the trip. Read on my friends...
On Tuedsday 7th February we wake early and pack the last of our stuff. At 06:40 we have to be at the Beijing Central Train Station for a 07:40 departure to Moscow. Most of our packing involves sorting out the food. We take it out of the fridge ie. off the windowsill outside, and share it out evenly between us to carry. Our main concern is the supposedly strictly-enforced 35kg weight limit for train passenger's baggage. Our 'big' packs weigh about 20kg each and our camera bags are about 7kg. Then there's our daypacks which are full of books so they're atleast 5 or 6kg too. So we're virtually on the 35kg weight limit before we even pick up the food bags. In an effort to beat the weight limit we purposely buy no drinks. Our plan is to get on the train with all our stuff then I'll nip back out into the station melée and purchase as many bottles of mineral water and pop as I can carry from the platform kiosks. The company we booked our train tickets with told us that we probably won't get asked to put our bags on the scales anyway as long as when we go through we don't look like we're struggling to carry them. Round the corner we do a few 'pre-bag-inspection' deep breaths and stretching exercises and then we haul everything up off the ground and stagger through to the platform, tickets clamped firmly between our teeth and giving our best "Heavy? Nah, hardly anything in 'em!" faces to the inspectors.
Our carriage is No. 14 out of 16 and is situated 500 miles down the platform somewhere not far from the Mongolian border which we're due to cross this evening. We are in cabin 2, berths 5 and 6. The other 2 berths in our cabin are shared by 2 Mongolian chaps about the same age as us. One tells us that he's been living in Washington DC in the U.S. for the last 8 years and is returning home to Ulan Baatar in Mongolia because he misses his family. The other guy is his friend who he met in Beijing and who doesn't speak any English. They seem nice and friendly though and it's good to have someone in our cabin who we can talk to.
We leave on time at 07:40 and head off towards Mongolia full of excitement at the coming journey. Our cabin is quite nice. The beds are comfy and the linen clean and pressed. On the floor there's a nice rug and a small vase of flowers on the table. Under each bottom bunk there is a storage box which is half the length of the bed and all our valuables go in there. It can only be accessed by lifting up the hinged bunk bed itself which acts as the lid so it's a great idea as it means no one can have a rummage through your stuff when you're asleep. At the end of each carriage there's a toilet and washroom and next to this is the guard's room as each carriage has its own guard. There is also a big water boiler by the guards room which is kept full of boiling water at all times so you have instant hot water to make a tea or coffee or some noodles 24 hours a day.
Ninety minutes into the journey we pass under the Great Wall of China at Badaling but we're all too busy nattering and don't realise we've missed it until it's too late. We saw the odd patch of snow in Beijing but not a great deal but by midday snow covers everything and not long after that it's snowing quite heavily as we trundle through the countryside. At 13:00 the guard comes round to give us a free-meal voucher each for the dining-car and to inspect our tickets and passports to make sure everything is in order for this evening's border crossing. I notice that the Mongolian chap who has spent the last 8 years in America entered the U.S. in January 1999 on a 3-month tourist visa and doesn't have an exit stamp. So it looks like he has been working there illegally and his return to Mongolia has probably got more to do with being forced to than he's led us to believe. The dining-car is 4 carriages away from ours towards the front of the train so I nip down there to grab our lunches which they will pack into plastic containers take-away style so we can eat them in our cabin if we want. As you make your way between 2 carriages you have to open 2 sets of double doors and as you open the middle 2 separating each carriage you are hit in the face by an icy blast of air and a face full of snow. You don't actually go outside between carriages but there are gaps between the panels and snow is being blown through these rather vigorously. Infact, even though it's only been snowing for the last hour, there's already a centimetre of snow on the floor in each of these icy cubicles!
At 20:40, 13 hours on from Beijing, we pull into Erlian where the Chinese border formalities are carried out. Our passports are collected and taken away and then we have a choice of spending 3 hours on the train or 3 hours in the station building. The Mongolian chaps get off but Lynn and I decide to stay on the train and not only because we're comfortable and warm but also because we want to witness one of the most incredible railway engineering feats. You see, to stop Western forces invading Russia along the railways, Russia decided to adopt a different line gauge to the rest of the world so nobody else's trains would fit the tracks. As a result, Russian lines are 10cm wider than Europe's, or indeed China's, lines. Mongolia's railway lines were laid by the Russians so they operate on the Russian gauge which is why at the Chinese/Mongolian border we are backed up into a big rail-shed and then in turn each carriage is hoisted off the ground by a giant crane arm, Chinese wheels are disconnected, Russian ones slotted into place and then we are shifted across and placed gently down on top of slightly wider Russian rails. It takes 3 hours and for obvious reasons - like the fact that you're dangling in the air - you cannot get off and all toilet facilities are out of bounds lest some poor unfortunate mechanic gets a face full of wee whilst he's busy underneath with his wrench!
Once we're finished, we're backed out onto a different platform, anyone who got off can get on again, passports are returned complete with fresh Chinese exit stamps, a new Russian locomotive is attached and then finally we're on our way again. The two Mongolian guys have been to the Duty-free shop and return with half-a-dozen bottles of Russian vodka and Chinese whiskey. The whiskey bottles make me laugh - they are exactly the same as "Grant's Whiskey" except for two small details. One they taste like shit and two they're called "Grunt's Whiskey". Otherwise the bottle, packaging and design are an exact replica. The vodka is 80% proof and could melt through an engine block given 30 minutes and half a chance. As guests in Mongolia, Lynn and I are each poured a "Mongolian Shot" or translated that's 3/4 of a mug to you and I. A short while later and we pull into Dzamyn Ude where the Mongolian entry formalities are done. Again our passports go off and two hours later they're returned and we set off again. By this time it's 02:20 in the morning, Lynn and I have begrudgingly accepted a 2nd "Mongolian shot" of paint stripper and the other guys have polished off the rest of the litre bottle between them and cracked open a second. Lynn and I get into bed and try really really hard to get some sleep whilst the other two do their utmost to change our minds from thinking that they're decent fellows... It doesn't take them long.
I dozed for a little while whilst the second bottle of vodka is finished and one of the guys has thrown up not once, but twice. The first time was all over the rug and the second time was all over the bottom half of Lynn's bed (and she was on the top bunk too!).
At 04:30 I am woken up for the final time by severe whimperings from the bed opposite as the English-speaking Mongolian starts dribbling all over himself and then crying before violently kicking his own bed, falling straight back into it and then passing out only to start snoring in almighty roaring spasms everyone 30 seconds or so. At 06:30, realising that no more sleep is coming my way, I get up. A little while later Lynn also gets up and a little while after this our two drunken friends surface too. They are still absolutely blind-drunk and stagger about all over the place and make a dreadful attempt at pouring coffee for themselves but successfully manage only to cover both themselves and the cabin in coffee powder, milk and boiling water. At 10:00 they head off to the dining-car for breakfast. Lynn and I refuse to join them as, in their drunken state, they have made it blatently obvious that one of them was going to head off to the toilet on the way and then come back and have a little look through our bags before joining up with us again in the dining-car. I say it was obvious because they were actually arguing about which one of them should go to the toilet and which one of them would stay with us!
After 30 minutes of doing their best to get us to leave the cabin, they give up and head to the dining-car alone and Lynn and I finally get an hour of peace and quiet to enjoy the wonderful views of the snow-covered Gobi desert and the rolling hillsides of southern Mongolia. After an hour our unwelcome room-mates return and it looks like breakfast was of the alcoholic variety. We wouldn't have believed it possible before they left but they are actually far more inebriated than when they left an hour ago. Yesterday's duty-free "Grunt's" which we were told in more sober moments were presents for friends and family are pulled out and splashed into mugs still containing the remnants of the earlier attempt to make coffee. It's 2 hours until we get to Ulan Baatar - their stop - and the time just can't go quickly enough. They both go through stages where they are on the verge of throwing up again, cupping their mouthes and wiping their eyes - heads bent over between their legs as they fight back the urge to be sick whilst suffering the drunken taunts of the other. We try to get them to stop drinking but they are egging each other on to finish a bottle each before they get off.
We arrive at Ulan Baatar on-time at 13:15. It's a 30 minute stop but they are so engrossed in their drinking competition that they barely realise and Lynn and I have to practically kick them out of the cabin to get them to leave. Finally though they're out and we can breathe a huge sigh of relief. In the final moments the English-speaking one was trying to get us to go out onto the platform with him "to say goodbye whilst my friend will bring all the bags in a moment". They probably thought it was a brilliant and cunning final plan to get us to leave our posessions alone for 5 minutes but to anyone who hadn't downed 2 litres of spirits in the last 12 hours it was painfully obvious what their thinking was.
Finally we're rid of them though and for the final 10 minutes at the station we sit and wonder who our next cabin buddies are going to be. To our surprise and relief we find that we have it all to ourselves, atleast for a further 3 hours until the next station. After we depart we clean up the place and then settle down for some much-needed quiet time. Eight hours later at 21:00 we are still on our own as we reach the town of Sukhebaatar which, with a population of 23,700 is the third largest settlement in Mongolia, a country the size of Western Europe! Sukhebaatar is almost on the Russian border so the Mongolian exit formalities are done here. It takes just over an hour and then we depart again. An hour later and we stop at Naushki, the first town in Russia and the place for Russian border formalities. From this station onwards everything runs on Moscow-time which is 5 hours behind our present location so according to the station clock it's now only 18:15 when we get here but outside of the station it's actually 23:15!
We had been led to believe the Mongolian/Russian border crossing was a very strict and cheerless affair, especially on the Russian side but we found the Russian officials to be some of the friendliest border guards we've encountered in the last year. We were greeted with a smile and a "Hello" whereas in most places they seem to struggle to even acknowledge your presence most of the time. One soldier helped us with the customs declaration by filling it in for us because it was all in Russian on one side and Chinese on the other and we didn't have a clue! A dog-handler comes by checking for drugs and a very stern woman comes in looking for illegal immigrants. At 01:30 (20:30 MT) our passports are returned and even though we're supposed to stay up until we depart which is still a further 90 minutes away we are absolutely shattered.
"They'll wake us if they want us again", I tell Lynn before locking the cabin door, turning off the lights and climbing into bed. Luckily they don't and when we wake up the next morning we feel much more refreshed.
It's now Day 3 of our Trans-Mongolian journey and we pull into the city of Ulan-Ude at 07:15 (02:15 MT) for a 15 minute stop. I am already sat waiting with my coat and hat on as we pull into the station as I plan to find an ATM, get out some rubles and get back again before the train leaves. My thinking is that there's bound to be an ATM somewhere in the station, it's just a case of finding it in time! It's about -10C outside as I jump down onto the platform and there's about 15cm of snow on the ground. I dash up the metal steps of the bridge as fast as the slippery conditions will allow me, across the length of it and down again into the station building. I eventually find the ATM machine after a couple of minutes searching but there's only 1 problem, I'm the 11th person in the queue. I can't believe it, I look at my watch, 10 minutes to get back so 8 to be on the safe side. I'll never get to the machine in 8 minutes. I wait a couple of minutes just to see but in the end give up and return to the train empty-handed. It's not a big deal, we have plenty of "snacky" things we can eat and US$40 which we can probably use in the dining-car atleast. I can try again in the city of Irkutsk when we get there later in the afternoon. The scenery is beautiful - lots of pine trees and silver birch and miles and miles of endless snow. It's also a clear and sunny day with a bright, blue sky. Mid-morning we spot a black bear bounding through the snow away from us towards the trees. It's quite far away but still unmistakedly a bear.
At about 11:00 (06:00 MT) we draw alongside Lake Baikal which is both the largest and deepest freshwater lake in the world. We make friends with a Russian family in the cabin next to ours who joined the train in Mongolia and are travelling back to Moscow. They work in the Moscow Circus. He is a clown and she works as a masseuse for the entertainers. They also have their daughter with them who's about 7 or 8 years old. Next door to them is a little old lady who turns out to be a tiger trainer! She showed us her photo album of herself working with the tigers!
After following the shores of Lake Baikal for 207km the railway line continues west towards Moscow whilst the lake starts to turn north. An hour behind schedule we arrive at the city of Irkutsk, 65km west of Lake Baikal. It's supposed to be a 20 minute stop but because we're an hour late I really don't know how long we've got. Anyway, I head off to find an ATM again. I find one within the station building again, withdraw 1,000 rubles (which is about 20 squids) and leg it back to the train. It took 8 minutes and we left after 15 so I had plenty of time, I just didn't know that! We are still on our own in the cabin ever since the two drunks got off in Ulan Baatar which is great as it gives us more room to spread out.
At 20:00 I decide to head down to the dining-car with my newly withdrawn rubles and get us some hot lunch. We haven't had a decent hot meal for 2 days now so we could do with some "proper food". I head down towards the front of the train as before but when I get to the 4th carriage there's no dining-car, just another set of sleeping berths. Where on earth has the dining-car gone? I end up going the entire length of the 11 carriages to get to the one nearest the locomotive but there is definately NO dining-car. I make my way back to our carriage and pass through uttering a brief "Checking at the back..." to a bemused Lynn and carry on towards the rear. The very last carriage is now the dining-car but it's closed. Bugger.
I head back and tell Lynn and then we set about finding something to eat in our snack bag. We eventually settle for pizza but not the sort you've probably ever had before. This was an improvised one which we named "Trans-Siberian Pizza". It consists of a Ritz cracker with Laughing Cow cheese smeared on it and then a slice of pepperoni on top. Voila! Pepperoni pizza.
Day 4 and at 07:45 (03:45 MT - we passed through a time-zone in the night) we pull into the city of Krasnoyarsk. I nipped out to the shop and bought some fried onion - bread rolls and some orange juice. We lavish thick scrapings of Vegemite on the onion bread rolls and have them for breakfast, lovely!
At 13:00 I decide to try the dining-car again. I head towards the rear of the train first as it's much closer and I'm pleased to find the dining-car in the same place I left it yesterday. Unfortunately, it's also closed just like yesterday too. There are 3 men smoking at one of the tables and one of them waves an oily hand and a screw-driver towards the direction of the kitchen and says one word - "Kaput". Bugger again.
At 14:00 we stop off at Marinsk and so I nip out yet again for bread, cheese and salami. In the afternoon it starts to snow really heavily. The snow is so deep here already, the only evidence of cars in some driveways is an aerial poking out of the snow or the faint outline of the roof through the snowdrift. Some houses have snowdrifts all the way up their sides to the roof! We pass a number of snowplough- trains as we progress through this region.
At 18:30 (15:30 MT) we reach Novosibirsk and another time-zone change. For the seventh time in 2 days I don my woollies and leave the train - I'm bloody knackered with all this running about! I return with a big bag of pies, a loaf of bread and some giant pot noodles. That should keep us going until Moscow now as we've entirely lost hope of the dining-car being open anymore.
Day 5 and we wake up to yet another time-zone change. It was freezing in the cabin last night and as I open the blind to peer out of the window I am confronted by a wall of ice. A quick touch confirms why it looks like it's on the inside - it is. Still, it was luxury compared to next door where they have a wall of ice AND 3cm of snow on their window ledge! During the night we passed to within 80km of the Kazakhstan/Russia border when we went through the city of Omsk.
At 13:45 we stop off at Yekaterinburg but for once I don't need to get off as we have a giant bucket of noodles each for dinner. Not long after Yekaterinburg we pass a white obelisk sticking out of the snow. It announces that we have now left Asia and entered Europe.
By 19:00 (17:00 MT) we're both knackered and ready for bed. It doesn't help that we've done two 26 hour days in a row. Yesterday it was 21:00 at this time and the day before it was 23:00. I don't know whether to have breakfast, have lunch, have dinner, go to bed or get up anymore! We try to sit it out for a bit longer but it's no use and by 20:00 we're in bed fast asleep.
Day 6: Monday 12th February, 2007 - Yet again we have ice on the inside of the window but strangely it doesn't feel so cold in here today. I can't believe we've had the cabin all to ourselves ever since Ulan Baatar - still, I think it's the least we deserved after putting up with those two drunken halfwits on the first night! We polish off the last of the food at lunch-time and a short while later at 14:30 (14:30MT!) we arrive at Yaroslavsky Station in Moscow. As part of the train package we bought from 'Monkey Business' in Beijing we have someone to meet us at the end of the platform and take us to the hotel. We have 2 nights at the Arbis Hotel. It's a 3 star hotel and costs nearly 80 squid a night between us but it's not as nice as our City Central Hostel room in Beijing. Luxury compared to an icy railway carriage though!
We have 2 full days in Moscow and so after breakfast we buy a couple of Metro tickets and head for Red Square. The first thing we do is head to Lenin's Mausoleum - so that's waxy, dead Communist leader No. 3 we've seen now in the space of 6 weeks! Lenin died in 1935 so he's been dead a while but despite this he's still in better condition than dog-eared Chairman Mao!
After seeing Lenin we head over to St. Basil's Cathedral. If there's one structure that to me is synonymous with Russia then it's St. Basil's Cathedral. This fairytale castle with it's colourful onion-shaped dome roofs is to Moscow what the Eiffel Tower is to Paris. It's magnificent and I take a number of photos before we head inside. The inside, I have to say, is not what I expected. There is no single, giant amphitheatre like in most churches. Instead, it's as if each tower has been built separately and then a little doorway knocked into one to connect them all together. So what you get is a number of small, dark rooms connected by unlit, tiny corridors and stairwells. Very strange - I think I prefer the outside!
The next day we head to the Kremlin where we spend half a day. Many of the buildings inside this walled fortress are off-limits to the general public so maybe only a third of the site is visitable. We had a wander around the permitted areas and inside the various museums and churches... yawn, yawn. We saw the Tsar's Cannon which is the largest cannon in the world although it's never been fired so nobody knows if it actually works or not. We also saw the Tsar's Bell which, at 200 tonnes, is also the largest bell in the world. In 1737 there was a fire here and in the inferno a piece of the bell broke off. It must have been one hell of a blaze!
After we left the Kremlin we headed to Sculpture Park where, after the break-up of the U.S.S.R., all the statues of the former Soviet leaders were dumped. We took a number of photos of the likes of Lenin and Stalin but most of the stuff was buried under great drifts of snow.
At 22:30 we take a taxi to Leningradsky Station and at 23:55 we leave Moscow on the overnight express to St. Petersburg.
We arrived at St. Petersburg at 07:55 on Thursday 15th February and were met at the end of the platform by a former work-colleague of mine, Phil. He had decided to join us for the last 3 days of the trip and then fly back with us to London. We take a taxi to the nearby Hotel Ergecon where we are booked in for our last 3 nights. After a spot of breakfast we decide we really ought to head out and see some sights. After all, there's less than 100 hours of the holiday remaining now!
We head to The Hermitage as our first priority. The Hermitage is reputedly the world's largest art gallery with over 3,000,000 works of art and apparently if you walked up and down each of the galleries you would have covered a staggering 25km by the end of it! Of course, it's all rather overwhelming and you'd need a week to see everything but we spent an enjoyable if tiring 4 hours there and saw all the bits we wanted to see. In the evening we went to a marvellous little Ukranian restaurant called "Shinok" where I just had to have the authentic "Chicken Kiev"!
We also visited 'The Church of the Spilled Blood', a rather gruesome name for an exceedingly pretty church. It's another typically Russian, fairytale castle-type church. Apparently the church was built on the ground where Tsar Alexander II was assasinated in 1881 hence the rather grisly name. We did a lot of shopping that day too. I succumbed to buying a big, no I mean BIG - B.I.G. furry Russian army hat. It's lovely and warm and I managed to find a nice communist hammer & sickel pin-badge to go on the front too! Lynn bought some fur-lined leather boots which are lovely too.
In the evening we went to possibly the strangest Indian restaurant in the world. It was called "Kashmir" but that was as far as the resemblance to anything remotely Indian actually went. It was a vegetarian place and most of the dishes were weird fruit salady type things with tofu on top. It wasn't horrible but, like I say, it wasn't Indian either so not at all what we were expecting.
On Saturday 17th February we visited the Peter & Paul Fortress which was rubbish, followed by the Artillery Museum which was excellent, full of some of the largest rockets and bombs you can imagine. The only disappointment was the fact that all of the information was only in Russian. From the Artillery Museum we went over to the old Russian Battle Cruiser "Aurora" which has been a museum since it was retired from the Navy in 1950. Again, it was very interesting but as Lynn so rightly put it afterwards, "I think I'm a bit militaried out after today".
Sunday 18th February, and we have to be at the airport by 14:00 to check-in for our flight to London which means by the time we've packed our bags and checked out of the hotel we've got about 3 hours left to fill before we leave. We decide to fill it with a trip to the nearby Dostoevsky Museum which was very interesting. The museum itself is in the building where Dostoevsky used to live and wrote many of his most famous books and he also died here too. Whilst we were in there it really started to snow heavily and I began to harbour thoughts that maybe all the aeroplanes in St. Petersburg would be grounded and we wouldn't be able to go home just yet but deep down I knew it wasn't going to happen - it was just wishful thinking.
As it was, we left 45 minutes late because they had to de-ice the plane before we could take-off but finally we were on our way. Three and a half hours later at 18:15 UK time we landed at Heathrow airport. We collected our baggage, entered Arrivals and Lynn's dad was there to meet us and take us home.
So there it is. One year. 15 countries.
In the past 12 months I've been to Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, The Galapagos Islands, New Zealand, Australia, India, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, China and Russia. I've sunbathed on Copacabana Beach in Rio; visited the colossal 'Christ the Redeemer' statue; stood at the top of Sugarloaf mountain; I've seen a football match at the Maracana Stadium, the world's largest with a 200,000 capacity; spent 4 days on Ilha Grnade, one of the most beautiful tropical islands in the world; travelled down the Paranagua railway line, one of the most stunning journey's in South America; got drenched at the gargantuan Iguacu Falls on the Brazilian/Argentinian border. I've been to Buenos Aires, home of the Tango; stayed on the most amazing working Estancia in gaucho country; I've walked on glaciers; trekked in the astounding Torres Del Paine National Park in Southern Chile; I've been bored out of my mind on the rain-drenched island of Chiloe off the coast of Chile. I've wandered the streets of Chile's capital, Santiago; I've sampled the wine from some of Chile's finest vineyards; I've soaked it up in the thermal baths of Mendoza, trekked through the lunar valley in the Argentine Andes; encountered the surreal rock formations of the dinosaur valley and the salt plains of Salta in Northern Argentina; I've spent 5 days in the Atacama Desert where I've sandboarded in Death Valley; Star-gazed in the world's best location for looking at the night sky; I've wandered through mud pools and thermal geysers at over 5,000 metres above sea level; I've visited the absolutely weird alien landscape of southern Bolivia with it's red and green lakes, it's vast salt lakes containing a coral island full of isolated birds and a hotel made entirely of salt; I've encountered absolute devastation when my camera was stolen from me in Uyuni and overwhelming kindness whilst trying to deal with it; I've been to Potosi, once the richest city in the world with a mountain of solid silver and La Paz the highest Capital in the world; I've mountain-biked down the world's most dangerous road; I've sailed across Lake Titicaca and stayed on the beautiful 'Island of the Sun' at it's centre; I've watched condors whoosh past me whilst standing on the edge of the world's deepest canyon; spent 3 amazing nights sleeping out in the Amazonian Rainforest; I've trekked to the seventh wonder of the world, Machu Picchu and spent nearly 2 weeks in the beautiful Inca city of Cusco; I've surfed (badly) in the Pacific and seen more Peruvian archaeological sites than most Peruvian archaeologists; I've travelled along the amazing Devil's Nose Railway in Ecuador and narrowly escaped having to flee the town of Banos which was evacuated after a volcanic eruption only 2 days after we left. I've stood on the equator and cycled down Cotopaxi Volcano; I've spent my birthday swimming with sealions in the most beautiful paradise on earth - The Galapagos Islands. I've swum with sharks, turtles, manta rays, penguins and billions of colourful fish. I've crossed the international dateline somewhere over the Pacific. I've white-water rafted down the world's highest commercially rafted waterfall; jumped out of a plane at 4,000 metres above the ground; driven the length of New Zealand in a bloody awful van; bungy-jumped from New Zealand's highest bungy at 134 metres; I've done the Lord of the Rings sights tour; narrowly missed been smashed into the canyon walls on a Jet Boat; whale-watched in Kaikoura; visited the Sydney Opera House, walked the Sydney Harbour Bridge; sunbathed on Bondi Beach; stayed at a 5 star hotel in the heart of Sydney; stayed in a crappy dorm room in the heart of Sydney; I've visited the Olympic Park and swum in the Olympic pool; I've sweated in Mumbai; sweated even more in Ahmadabad; seen more forts, palaces and temples in India than anyone else alive; visited the annual Pushkar camel fair; been tiger-spotting in India's Ranthambore National Park; visited the Deshnoke Rat Temple; the Monsoon Temple; the Red Fort; the Red Palace; the absolutely incredible Taj Mahal; I've been rowed up the Ganges in the sacred city of Varanasi, spent 2 weeks in the colonial retreat of Darjeeling in the foothills of the Himalaya; ridden the toy-train; visited a tea plantation; watched Mount Everest appear at sunrise; visited the restricted state of Sikkim and the beautiful Buddhist temples of Gangtok; survived the mayhem of Kolkata; fell in love with Bangkok; visited the Royal Palace and the enormous Reclining Buddha; been for more Thai massages than I can remember; strolled the famous night-markets and learned to cook heavenly Thai dishes. I've spent 3 days at the astounding Angkor Wat temple site in Cambodia and the sobering Killing Fields and S-21 torture prison in Phnom Penh. I've swam in the world's warmest sea in Sihanoukville and been granted the world's fastest visa while I sat and waited. I've ran the gauntlet of mopeds in Ho Chi Minh City, crawled through the Viet Cong tunnels at Cu Chi, travlled up the Vietnamese coast to the pretty town of Hoi An, caught the train to Hue and flown Business Class to Hanoi. I've swam in Halong Bay and seen the preserved bodies of Ho Chi Minh, Chairman Mao AND Lenin!; I've travelled across China by train, seen the amazing hills of Guilin, the beautiful skyscrapers of Hong Kong and the almost as beautiful skyline of Shanghai. I've entered the Forbidden City; strolled in Tianenmen Square; walked along the Great Wall of China; caught the train all the way from Beijing to Moscow across the beautiful landscape of Siberia in winter. I've visited the Kremlin; walked through Red Square; visited the fairytale church of St. Basil's Cathedral; walked through the world's largest art gallery, The Hermitage, in St. Petersburg and... and... and... spent a year doing it all. I've met so many people; made so many friends and done things that I shall savour forever more. Was it the most amazing year of my life and an experience I really will never forget as long as I live? Well, what do you think?
Thank you sincerely to everyone who has made this trip what it was. From the people we met to the people who kept in touch with us from back home. We love you all!
Rich
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