Night location: Saint Petersburg, Russia An early start was required today in order to catch our four hour train between Moscow and Saint Petersburg. David had booked our tickets well in advance so we had a pod of four seats together around a table. The service was excellent and included a full meal that was better than what you would receive on most flights. We seemed to be some of the only people in our carriage to not be a part of a Malaysian tour group, whic...

Night location: Moscow, Russia Our final day in Moscow has been filled with one astounding sight after the other. We have really tried to see as much of this city as we can and yet we feel that another week here would not be time ill spent. The Kremlin is the apex of Russian political power but its red-brick walls also contain the most ancient square in the city - the Cathedral Square. Thanks to the Harold Halliday sacred tours of times gone by, we consider our...

Night location: Moscow, Russia It is difficult to describe the scale of what we have seen today. The Soviets/Russians place great value on huge open spaces, towering monuments and domineering buildings. To start our day we returned to Red Square and joined the queue to visit the Lenin Mausoleum. Since 1924 his body has been embalmed and on display for patriots to pay their respects. After an hour of waiting in the line we went through some security screening an...

Night location: Moscow, Russia Our day has gotten progressively better as it went on due to it starting with a pretty stressful transit from Heraklion to Moscow. Our flight was scheduled for 6:50am so we planned to leave our hotel at 5am as the airport is only about 10 minutes from the city centre. As Amber and David were leaving to check out at 4:50am, Amber knocked on Gem and Gareth's room to discover that they had just woken up 30 seconds before she knocked, ...

Night location: Heraklion, Greece The Palace of Knossos was our major objective for today. We arrived early so as to beat the massive cruise boat tour groups and also to avoid the heat of the day. The site has become somewhat infamous as Sir Arthur Evans, the British archaeologist who completed the major excavations in the early 1900s, chose to reconstruct significant portions of the 'palace' in 1925 using concrete widely across the site to create his own versio...