The route I'll take
My journey will begin in Tokyo, from where I will take the local train to the port city of Osaka, 3 hours to the West. From Osaka I’ll sail for two days across the East China Sea – hopefully avoiding any typhoons that sweep the area at this time of year! Arriving in Shanghai, I’ll spend a couple of days exploring this wealthy city, with its towering skyscrapers and hectic growth. The route to Beijing now sports a new high-speed rail link, bringing the next leg of my journey down to 10 hours; once in Beijing I shall visit the site of the 2008 Olympics, take a trip out to the Great Wall, and gorge myself on the local cuisine.
From Beijing, I’ll board a local train, destination: Mongolia. Skirting the east of the Gobi desert, I’ll continue on to the capital Ulaanbaatar; here I’ll stay in a traditional Ger (yurt) in a beautiful national park, and hopefully will find an alternative to sheep’s innards to keep me going (the guide book warns that often it's a case of mutton, mutton or mutton!); a few days later it will back on the train, this time heading for Lake Baikal. Known for its cleanliness and beauty, Lake Baikal will serve as my next resting place as I stay in a log cabin on an island halfway up its eastern shore. Following a couple of days sampling the local vodka, providing I am still walking, it’s on West, through Irkutsk, Krasnoyarsk, Novosibirsk and Yekaterinburg, until I finally arrive in Moscow, about a week later.
I’m not sure what I’ll make of the Russian capital – but after 4 days there I should be able to give you some idea of what this city feels like following the huge changes it has seen over the past decade.
The final leg of my journey will see me board the Moscow Belorussky, for a 26 hour train journey across Eastern Russia, through Belarus to Berlin, from where I’ll take the high-speed Thalis and finally Eurostar to London Waterloo. The final part of the journey, from London to Sheffield via my hometown of Hereford, may take significantly longer than the journey from Beijing to Moscow, depending on what kind of leaves are on the line…!
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