Yekaterinburg is famous for two things. Which one is more significant, I will leave you to judge! We arrived there on the train after lunch today having crossed the Ural Mountains. Yekaterinburg is the fourth largest city in Russia with an estimated population of just over 1.5 million. In the Communist era it was known as Sverdlovsk and reverted to the name...
Slightly bizarrely we spent the first part of the trip heading off to the east, stopping for a couple of hours at Novgorod and then heading all the way back west again! So, when we woke up in the morning we were just a few miles further on than we were after we went to bed! The reason was so that we could visit the towns of Vladimir and Suzdal. We actually stopped at...
A particularly exciting day today as we saw Vladimir Putin. Well actually we didn’t, but our guide was fairly cyonvinced that he was in one of the line of 15 or so blacked-out Mercedes which streamed last us as we did our tour of the Kremlin. Apparently, he normally lives around 40 minutes away and, because of the terrible Moscow traffic, he commutes into work...
At 16.05 we boarded the Polonez sleeper train at Warsaw Central Station. We had a compartment between us with a wash basin (under the table) but it was very comfortable for two. Initially it was all a little fraught and the train engineer (who we named the ‘fat controller’) was getting very upset with us all standing in the corridor. He was Russian (and...
On February 17th we start our journey to Hong Kong from St. Pancras. From London we head for Paris for one night and then on to Moscow via Berlin and Warsaw. At Moscow we board the Trans-Siberian via Ulan Bator to Bejing and then on to Hong Kong via Xian and Shanghai. The distances between each stop are: 0km London492km Paris1542km Berlin2092km Warsaw3348km...