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...