Around the Planet

If you couldn’t get tickets for the Reading or Leeds Festivals, then you might be pleased to hear that there are still tickets available for Lowlands 2009 in the Netherlands. Another plus for the Lowlands is that all the stages are under cover, ie: in tents, which is great if rolling around in the mud [...]

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Standing famously at the crossroads of East and West, and established over 3,000 years ago, Ankara is a city truly steeped in history, and offering a fine blend of Eastern and Western culture. If you are feeling the pinch of the credit crunch, yet yearning for a city break, the plethora of cheap hotels in [...]

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Following my post on David Rogers’ on-the-road travel blog Last Train to Lhasa, I was very happy to finally catch up with the man himself, who has just had a very hectic few months setting up his new web design company. We had a bit of a chat, and I asked David about some of [...]

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It was almost exactly a year ago, with another English winter on its way, that David Rogers decided that it might be more fun to spend winter in Tibet than in his usual London habitat, and so, travelling overland, he headed off east in the direction of Lhasa, Tibet. Thus, Last Train to Lhasa was [...]

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Coming out of Birmingham on the 35 or the 50 bus, you go out through Moseley, then through Moseley Village, (which is rather Bohemian and lively, and worth a visit in its own right), before coming into Kings Heath. Kings Heath was once a village, which slowly got swallowed up by the expanding conurbation of [...]

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Probably well off the tourist trail is the industrial city of Birmingham in the Midlands, which is affectionately known simply as “Brum”, and is a thriving multicultural metropolis.
Birmingham started out as a small Anglo-Saxon farming village dating back to the 7th century, and it is mentioned in the Domesday Book of 1086. By the [...]

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As well as an Introduction to the Trans-Siberian Railway, I have already discussed the Trans-Siberian railway proper, which is the Moscow-Vladivostok route, and the Trans-Mongolian alternative, more popular with the tourists, that goes via Mongolia to Beijing.

The third and final alternative for crossing Eurasia is the Trans-Manchurian route from Moscow to Beijing. This train, known [...]

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I have already talked about the Trans-Siberian Railway generally, and about what might be called the Trans-Siberian proper, which is the Moscow-Vladivostok route. However, a route which tends to be more popular with the tourists is the Trans-Mongolian. This route is the same as the Trans-Siberian as far as Ulan Ude, where it departs from [...]

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In my Introduction to the Trans-Siberian Railway, I spoke of the three possible routes that can be taken. Today I want to focus on the Moscow – Vladivostok route.
It is the Moscow to Vladivostok route that is the Trans-Siberian Railway proper, as opposed to the two other trans-Eurasian routes that end up in Beijing. The [...]

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The original idea to build a Trans-Siberian Railway, in order to connect the then capital of Russia, St Petersburg, with Vladivostok and the Pacific, was first approved by Czar Alexander III in 1891. Vladivostok had been founded in 1860, fulfilling Russia’s long standing desire for a Pacific port, and by 1880 it had rapidly grown [...]

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