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…

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…