We flew into Riga the capital of Latvia, the 17th and final country of our trip and were met by Auntie Joyce, it was lovely to see her after so long. As she had a free day we spent some time with her in the city which was far nicer than we had ever imagined. As Latvia was once ruled by Russia we had expected ugly Soviet style concrete buildings but the city has a lot of character and has well kept often colourful buildings dating back to the 1200's. Over the next...

Our time in Finland got cut a little shorter as our flight from Beijing was cancelled thanks to Finnair! So we had to get a flight the following day and just had 4 days, Martin's birthday was spent on the 8 hour flight to Helsinki. On arrival we headed 200kms north to Tampere for a couple of nights. Tampere is situated between two lakes and is quite scenic, we got a good view from the observation tower on top of a small hill in the town. The first thing we notice...

We continued our trip stopping at Erdene Zuu Khiid (Monastery) in Kharkhorin, Tsetserleg and Tsenkher Hot Springs. At our ger camp at the hot springs there was a large group of Mongolians on holiday with lots of children. A little boy burst into our ger one evening by accident, thinking it was his and he ran out giggling. Then for the next half a hour or so we had little children one at a time opening the door to look in at us thinking it was a great game! We th...

We set off on our 12 day trip in the Mongolian countryside on Tuesday morning and left paved roads almost as soon as we got out of Ulaanbaatar. We had Uugana our guide and Damda our driver to accompany us in a 4WD vehicle as you certainly wouldn't be able to navigate yourself. We were amazed as mud tracks weaved across wide open spaces of nothing criss-crossing with other mud tracks, that the driver knew where to go, without landmarks, signposts or GPS. We were t...

We stayed overnight in Beijing just so we could get the Trans-Mongolian Railway into Mongolia. We got the K23 train on Saturday morning, and were glad that it was a better standard than the overnight trains in Vietnam. We'd had to upgrade to a private 2 bed cabin as the others had all sold out and the cabin was clean and even had carpet on the floor. The scenery was green and mountainous as we left Beijing, gradually getting flatter and dryer as we neared the bor...