We're home! We landed back in the UK on 3 November having had a great 4 days in Tallinn with Donald and Christine, friends of ours from Fran's college days. It's strange being back - happy and sad - and it is good to finally be in one place for longer than 3-4 days. The priority has been getting the house back in order and seeing our immediate families. Catching up fully with friends is going to take quite a lot longer. So...where to next?,,,

We have less than a week left out of the 9.5 months of travel (boo!), but we're in St Petersburg with Fran's Mum & Dad (hurrah!). Despite the rain we've spent quite a few hours walking the streets and seeing some of the wonderful treasures in some of the Tsars' palaces. Our last train rides through european Russia were uneventful. The Ural mountains were quite low and rolling at the point that we officially moved from Asia to Europe which made a change from ...

By tomorrow morning we'll have done 2,900kms through Siberia on the trans-Siberian railway from Ulan Ude to Omsk which has taken us a couple of weeks as we've been stopping off en route. Lake Baikal (the world's deepest lake at 1 mile) lived up to its reputation as the 'jewel of Siberia' from our viewpoint on Olkhon Island. This was a 7-hour bus journey from Irkutsk and was worth the terrifying speed of the outward journey. We stayed in a quirky homestead set up...

As we write, our Mongolian adventure is already over! We only had 8 days, but the country is so huge that to have been able to tour beyond the Terelj national park - 2 hours from Ulanbator (the capital) - we would have needed a further 2 to 3 weeks at least. We had a great 4 days staying in a family 'ger' (felt tent) in the Terelj. The food was pretty good (and pretty meaty) and the milk tea and the local hooch (made of fermented mare's milk) were both very hard...

Beijing is a real mix of old and new. This was Fran's third time (the first being 22 years ago!), while Andy was on virgin territory. We stayed in a hostel in one of the old 'hutongs' (network of alleyways). It had loads of character, a great place for people-watching and had thankfully avoided the pre-Olympics bulldozers. Also we overlapped with Emma & Jay again for a couple of days which was great. The number of vehicles on the roads was amazing, and the hu...