A month of unemployment preceding my departure would surely result in me being extreamely organised by the time I left on my long journey to London. But of course it seems impossible for me to do anything till the last minute so 10mins before I’m due to leave for the airport I am still throwing everything […]

So came the end of my trip. The ride to the airport I was feeling pretty neutral about the whole thing, not nervous or excited…just that it was the next thing to do. We got to the airport with way too much time to spare, I spent a bit of time waiting talking to an American […]

Shangri-La was first a fictional place described in the 1933 novel Lost Horizon by British author James Hilton. It was a mythical Himalayan paradise where everyone was happy and things were sweet. Since then Shangri-la ha been used as a term for travelers to describe their perfect holiday spots, and also become a international hotel chain. Clever […]

This 2 day trek through a gorge close to Lijang has become one of China’s top things to do. And its not for Chinese tourists either, there is no paved road and music, just a gorge and a path. I took a mini van from the guest house with a Dutch couple, Lois and Sieber and […]

Our final days in Chengdu we decided to get active and headed off bright an early to climb Mt Qingchensan, a nearby holy Taoist mountain. Now when I say climb, I don’t really mean climb, more like walk. As with all Chinese tourist attractions, people don’t really want to have to work hard to do anything […]

Chengdu is very famous for panda’s, basically the only remaining wild ones live close by and there is a big panda breeding center in the city. The government has thrown a lot of money into panda breeding the last few years and China and Chengdu are regarded as the place to go and see panda’s. So […]

(for a more complete and probably better written account of our trip check out Rdoc’s blog here) We survived our 13 hour drive through the mountains to arrive in a small town. Petty exhausted from the drive we didn’t leave till late the next day. The drivers spent most of the morning practically rebuilding the vans, when […]

Space is likely to be the thing I most remember about our 13 day Gobi trip. Lots of flat, open space. While beautiful not altogether helpful if your a female trying to find a toilet spot. Through our guest house we had arranged a van and a driver to take us for 13 days through the […]

Leaving Russia was a 2 night train ride into the heart of Mongolia, our next destination. As I mentioned before the train was really just one carriage that was attached to different trains across the two countries and well over half of these were foreigners, all doing the same ‘lonely planet’ tour as you may say. […]

From Olkhon Island it was another long 7 hour journey back into Irkutsk where we picked up our passports (complete with Mongolia visa!) and made use of the rest of the day which was an amazing 16 degrees (the warmest since Lithuania). I had a wander around the big food market where I picked up some […]

Writing this from our hostel in Irkutsk, we are over half way to Beijing, it’s been about 2 weeks since leaving Suzdal and it truly has been a crazy journey. We have now crossed right over Siberia and have made it to our last Russian destination. People often told me that Russian travel was difficult and […]

Our last couple of days in Moscow before heading out east on the Trans-Siberian proper, we spent the day out in one of the “golden ring” towns called Sergiev Posad. Of course a very complicated train situation to get there but we eventually made it on to one of the suburban, hard benched seated train with […]

(St Basil’s Cathedral) Nyet (No) seems to be Russian service people’s favourite word. Particularly at train stations where we write in Cyrillic what we want and hand it over, waiting in anticipation to see if she will turn to her computer and start processing the ticket or shut us down with Nyet. Then that would be […]

My travels around Eastern Europe have felt like they are preparing me for the ultimate country of Russia. As the whole point of this trip was the trans-Siberian it was exciting to be on the train heading into the country. We had a nice train on the way in, a Finnish train I think, not […]

As I mentioned in my last post the rain had started on the way to Riga, Latvia’s capital and was set in to stay when me and Joe arrived in the late afternoon. We pulled up our hoods and set off to find our hostel, a big place run by Australians..they are everywhere…like a plague. I […]

The Baltic’s definitely have a different feel to them from the rest of Eastern Europe, but still similar in that there is an old town with a lot of nice buildings and old churches…which by now I may be getting sick of. It does seem more western and less soviet influenced as you go through the […]

My stop in Poland was brief as best, mostly due to the fact I wasn’t really planning on going but unfortunately the visa strict Belarus lies between Ukraine and my next destination of Lithuanian. So I decided to stop over for a day rather than take the direct 16 hour bus. I hate buses…although ironically after […]

The 20 hour journey towards Lviv (or Lvov in Russian) was a frustratingly slow and altogether soviet experience, it was probably the most eastern European feeling, no other tourists, lots of big ugly apartment blocks scattered through the country side, lots of abandoned factories and a few villages that probably haven’t changed for years. With my […]

Coming in at the number one most random country I have visited, Moldova is about as far off the beaten track you can go in Europe and lives up to its (non) reputation of a strange, soviet country with no tourists. Actually not no tourists, there were 2 others in the ‘hostel’ I was staying at, […]

So like I mentioned before Dracula is based on some guy called Vlad who would impale people, still he’s the closest thing to the Dracula we know so of course towns connected to him capitalize on the Dracula thing, a lot. So being the tourists that we are, we headed of to Sighisoara to Vlad’s birth […]