Climbed up to the top of The Great Wall and toboganned down - what a laugh! The Great Wall is amazing, what a feat and the views are to die for, but couldnt help but think of our VP at work as I climbed up and down huge, uneven stairs with no handrail - those pesky ancient Chinese obviously didnt do a risk assessment before they started work :) - the constant brain washing at work has definitely paid off on me...:)。 After leaving The Wall, travelled back to the...

Completed the last leg of the Trans-siberian！ It was an experience, the trip from UB to Beijing was short compared to the last leg - Chinese passport control was tedious as I expected, but the change from the Russian railway guage to the Chinese one was pretty interesting. They took our passports to check our visas then the whole train was taken into a huge shed. The carriages were split up - the whole carriage, with us inside it was lifted up on a winch thi...

hello, back again - forgot that I had another night here before Beijing! Anyway, my first day in UB city was okay, but the second was fabulous and much more my style - we were picked up by our local guide and visited a Mongolian Monastery where we were lucky enough to be there when quite a big ceremony was taking place. The building was your typical Buddist temple style, but the ceremony itself was really different from the Thai ceremonies - there were around 1...

Hopefully, this will work on my third attempt! We set off at 1230am from a very cold Moscow station with no waiting room (!) and no English signs anywhere to be seen. I wasnt sure what the sleeping arrangements would be in our group of two couples, the tour guide and me. I discovered that the two couples had upgraded and I would be sharing with Ythan and two others - thought this was okay until I discovered the two others were Attila the Huns sister and Ghengi...

So, just had my first Russian beer - not too bad! Even with my vivid imagination can't pretend Moscow is a foodie haven, but they do a mean chicken sandwich when all that I have to look forward to are noodles and chocolate for the next 4 days! Moscow has its charms though, the Kremlin and Red Square were all I had time for, but the Metro is out if fabulous. Saw president Putins own little train line earlier, so no summing it for him. We have a very small grou...