Arriving in Irkutsk at 8 am, we found our honcho who took us on an hour bus ride to Lake Baikal. When your driver's throwing on dark techno early on a Wednesday morning and his car freshener just reads 'sex first', you're in safe hands. After some crazy overtaking, we arrived at the chalet by the lake, got some borscht and went over to the lake museum. Although interesting, this is just a bit of a fact-dropping wikipedia situation until they show you the differen...

We got into Moscow pretty early morning so went to our hostel, freshened up and the honch took us to the Kremlin, St Basils and the tomb that Lenins body, despite his best wishes, is being preserved in. They reckon only 10% of his skin is still in tact, though they never mention which 10... You walk around him and he's surrounded by these intimidating guards, staring down the tourists and keeping us moving. We went on to grab a bite on a boat and then trecked thr...

After a tense border control, we had a few hours on the bus until St Petersburg. This bug had made its way on board and was floating around the girl in front of me. Despite her ruthless ways and best efforts to kill it, it kept getting back up. There`s me thinking in Russia, even the insects are solid. Anyway, time-wise everything was running smooth so I`d be pretty comfortable to check in to the hostel and make the all-important first meet. There were 8 of us on...

As had been the case for near enough the whole of Europe, the sun was shining bright in Tallinn. With all my gear and no idea, I took a few wrong turns on the way to the hostel as per and took an accidental stroll through the Old Town which is really nice and not much different to Riga`s. Some of the lads from Riga had also come up so met them and went on what would be my last bar crawl for a good month. It was with their hostel where a record 75 people had shown...

After one of my shorter bus journeys I arrived in the energetic city of Riga. Naturally I gravitated to the bar in my hostel, known as the Aussie pub, serving 14 local Latvian beers... Met this portugese guy running the shooting tour, who introduced me to the group that cracked the tour out that day. This included 4 Dutch guys and an Aussie. After getting the taster option and giving all 14 brews on offer a go, six of us went on to a Latvian restaurant, who were ...