This article was picked up by TNT Magazine in April 2014 One summer day two years ago I heaved my rucksack over my shoulder and set off on the trip of a lifetime. Over the next month I sat on train after train, either alone or thrown in with some truly colourful company, whizzing between some of the great European cities: Paris, Brussels, Berlin, Warsaw, on to Moscow, through the wilderness of Siberia, the plains of Outer Mongolia, the Gobi Desert, the lush greenery of China’s countryside and the madness of its colossal cities, until finally my last ride ground to a standstill in Hanoi and I stepped down onto…
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The Wonders of Europe by Rail – Rail Europe Blog, October 2012
You can read a brief extract from the European leg of my London to Vietnam by rail trip in the summer of 2012, which appeard on the Rail Europe Blog, the ‘Train of Thought’. Tweet
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Culinary Adventures on the Trans Siberian Foodway – October 2012
An article I wrote on the weird and wonderful food I ate along my trip from London to Vietnam by rail has appeared on the We Blog the World Website Tweet
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‘Track Records’
In June and July I took my biggest trip to date, a 10,000 mile adventure from London to Vietnam entirely by train. In two months of intense travelling I went through Paris, Brussels, Bremen, Berlin, Poznan, Warsaw, Vilnius, St Petersburg and then Moscow. From there I boarded the Trans Siberian Railway, through Yekaterinburg, Irkutsk, Ulan-Ude and on into Ulan Bator, Mongolia. All that was left from there was Beijing, Guilin in Southern China, and finally the last big stretch was Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam. While I was travelling I wrote all the time; notes, thoughts, stories and dramas. A portion of these writings appeard in the form of a…
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Au revoir for now..
Dear all.. so it’s official now I’m going on a big trip (or maybe a farce) starting in two weeks, travelling from the UK to Vietnam by rail, including the Trans Siberian Railway. It’s a reckless ‘end of 20s meltdown’, during which I will be spending a disturbing amount of time in small train carriages with questionable toilet facilities and no doubt a good cross-section of bodily odours. Can’t wait. And before I go I was wondering if peeps might be able to give me some tips…. Tweet
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Into the vortex: the train to London
You can feel the energy around you change as you approach London. It’s something in the atmosphere; the pressure rises and the speed increases as though you were approaching some great vortex. The view out of the window of the train becomes busier, harder, greyer, denser. The eyes have less space to see out to and more details to focus on. Perhaps it’s just nerves. It’s a journey I’ve taken too many times to count but more often than not there’s some big reason to be going back to the city I lived in for four years, the place where my career began. Usually it’s a bit of work that’s…