The pointed finger Our beautiful big red bus arrived in Yining at 18.45 but we didn’t know if our train left at 20.21 or 22.21. All Chinese trains run on Beijing time and Yining and Urumqi, the city where we were headed, operate on local time (two hours earlier) so we were in a hurry […]
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The big red bus to China The big red bus journey to China was easily the best bus journey we have had. I wasn’t scared by the driving at any point, helped largely by the flat terrain but the bus was also big and demanded a certain amount of respect going around corners. None of
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Riding with the sons of Genghis Khan – Theo’s blog (By the time this post is up, we should be finally heading to the Chinese border!) The prospect for our 2 day train trek across the Steppes of Kazakhstan was not looking so great. I’d been placed in a separate compartment from Shan and Rosa;
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Stroking a bat and shaking hands with a bear – Theo’s blog It’s not surprising that when we first arrived, without a hitch, in Southern Russia, we wondered for a moment if we were in some kind of artificial “Truman Show” set designed to enchant and deceive gullible western visitors with its loveliness. But it
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From Russia, with love (…and if I’m honest a little bit of fear!) Halfway through the train journey that took us out of Russia and into Kazakhstan, I had to delete this post. At that point Theo had been being interrogated for nearly an hour by Russian security forces. Theo spoke quickly and
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We made it into Russia! I am sitting outside a hotel (that isn’t ours) using their Wi-Fi…so I will keep this brief. More to follow soon of our Russian adventure, the rescuing of bats, and ‘The Prisoner of Astrakhan’…
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Keep your fingers crossed! Today we are heading to Russia. I vacillate (..don’t you think the word ‘vacillate’ sounds a little Russian, like a combination of Vladikavkaz (where we are going) and Vladivostok (where we are not going) …anyway, I vacillate between thinking crossing the border will be a formality, an easy trip, bored border guards
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Profanities and Prayers I am struggling to find the words to describe yesterday… I used up all my best ones on the day before…so Mrs Speechless of Somerset is going to have to dig deep! Let’s start with the good news…the one excellent thing that came out of our need to find another hotel yesterday, was
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Thor’s wrath – a tale of Tbilisi We’re all writing an account of what happened that night, because, well, it was one hell of an experience. Not helped by the difficult rainy night in Batumi the day before where we struggled to find our hostel, or by the hair-raising eight hour minibus ride to Tbilisi
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Not “JUST” another rainy night in Georgia Yesterday we found out that it’s one thing to read about “extreme weather events” and quite another to walk through one for 5 km with heavy rucksacks looking for an obscure hostel in a large foreign city as darkness falls. On our knuckle-whitening 8 hour mini-bus Helter-Skelter ride
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