Travel
A Journal of travels across the greater portion of the world – from Finland to the heart of China, taken almost exclusively on trains, including the justifiably infamous trans-Siberian railway, which in the flesh is far less glamorous than Christie would have you believe. This was a month during the summer of 2008, all those years ago, and occupied the heady space between graduating university and starting post-graduate studies. It has taken me a couple of years to finally get around to typing it up!
Finland – A land of untamed and unfettered beauty and working environmentally sound cities. It is telling that although the population of Helsinki is only slightly short of London, it feels just like a busy town, in stark contrast to the bustling hell of the British capitol; the transportation system in particular is so well put together, with a sage mix of trains, trams and busses all more-than reasonably priced.
Russia – The Leviathan herself, once the power to make the world tremble, now an unwieldy, belligerent behemoth beset with bureaucracy and corruption. Spending so long in a country having your romantic pre-conceptions shattered like so much cheap crystal by the misanthropy of the people is agonising, true, but the beast does retain the percolated, distilled potent memory of the glory of Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky.
Mongolia & China – An unexpected gem of a place, Mongolia, with a very honest, unpretentious atmosphere, full of friendly people, beautiful landscapes, and boasts quite breathtaking vistas of the cosmos thanks to the scarce light pollution at night. China is a painful juxtaposition; it smacks of nascent Westernisation, but the vestiges remaining hark to the country’s deep and glorious history.
The trans-Siberian railway
Things thought 
Chris, I really must thank you for uploading these journals of two years ago – it has been a thoroughly pleasant morning spent reading them, not least because I finally get the feeling that we both experienced the trip with similar emotions. Though of course, both of our writings are necessarily anecdotalised (mine almost cheaply so), and probably hiding some of our more private feelings on the journey.
May I take the liberty of including a link to the photos of the trip, the visual counterpart to your prose?
http://picasaweb.google.com/laingsam/TheTransSiberianExtravaganzzza#
The pictures are still very pleasing to me, especially because they mirror the style of the journal in recording those scenes worthy of remaining in memory, and thus having almost completely excised the group of people who represented exactly what I was hoping to escape by taking that journey.
The memories I have chosen to keep are near exclusively pleasant, and I fully intend to return to Mongolia some day, and sample the country away from the touristy façade that does such an intrusive job of trivialising the country’s natural glory. That country needs to be savoured in the absence of groups of day-trippers, and I hope this is something I can allow myself.
Hah! Following the reading, I trawled back through my inbox and found my very brief summary of half the trip for the benefirt of Tim. I’m sure he won’t mind my sharing such intimacy:
So much stuff has happened since we last communed that there is no way I can cram anything more than a severely abridged version into this email before my 15 minutes of Internet cafe time are up. So, I guess I’m pretty much halfway through the grand Trans-Siberian adventure. I have been awed by the grandeur of the Orthodox church (Something that would turn even Will’s head and make him wonder if he is subscribing to a suitably grand branch of Christianity), I have stared reverently at the cold, grimacing corpse of Lenin, I have been cooped up in a tiny 4-man berth on a train speeding through siberia for 75 solid hours, I have granted myself a further 25 years of youth by swimming in the cold waters of Lake Baikal, and I have slowly ridden through the majestic Mongolian steppe on horseback.
Of course, I suitably edit the account to include only the more pleasant things I have encountered. It’s never all sunshine and roses, and by the time I return I will have a paralysing phobia of mass tourism, vodka and anyone from Australia. Long stories all, but I can safely say that this will be my last encounter with orgnised tourism. The artificial world created for the foreign visitor is truly nauseating at times, as is the way in which most visitors swallow it hook, line and sinker. So yeah, safe to say that this man has learned lots.
Well I just hope the language is not too obtusely idiomatic. I am honoured you read through them again, I must confess typing them out I got a little sick of the sound of my own voice! But it’s good to relive the more epic moments of the trip, like standing in Red Square at dusk, or on the great wall. I would love to go back to Mongolia too, it was one of those completely unexpected pleasures; I was I think expecting it to be a little China, to a certain extent, but it has such a strong independent feel to it, more so that China certainly. Watching the stars that night is still one of the strongest memories I have to date, it was just so extraordinary. Sigh.
We’ll see how Finland is on the return, too.