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tankhoy station

keeping the diary

The answer to this question is one sentence: the Trans-Siberian Express. Or, more specifically, Train Number Six from Moscow to Ulaanbaatar. What better way to arrive in Mongolia for a sabbatical year than as a passenger on the world's most famous train service? 6269 kilometres of track from Moscow and four-and-a-bit days of travel in which to get settled in, relax and enjoy the passing scenery of Siberia and, ultimately, Mongolia.

So, in early 2006, I spent a good deal of time looking into the best way to go about booking tickets on Train #6. Easier said than done, actually. The cheapest way to buy Trans-Siberian tickets is in person at Yaroslavski station in Moscow, but that was obviously out of the question for us! So the next best way is through a Russian travel agency. I would wholeheartedly recommend the website www.seat61.com for anyone thinking of journeying on the Trans-Siberian railway. There is a wealth of information on this site, with particular regard to how to actually book your tickets. We organised our tickets through the Svezhy Veter in Russia. Be ready to deal with old-style Soviet bureacracy, however, and also be prepared to fax a photocopy of your credit card to the travel agent - not something I felt very happy about doing, but pretty standard procedure in Russia. After a few battles with fax machines and several anxious days of waiting, our tickets arrived by courier in the UK.

Next came the visa. There is the option of paying over the odds for a company in the UK to go through the whole process on your behalf, but that's expensive, so we chose to go in person to the Russian Embassy in London. On the evening of April 9th 2006, I was performing at the Glee Club in Birmingham at the Church of Logick album launch, on the early morning of April 10th we were on our way to London by bus. After a frustrating couple of hours waiting outside the Russian Embassy as part of the Guiness World Record slowest moving queue, we were turned away and told to come back the next day. That afternoon we went and applied for our Mongolian visas (no problem at all), that evening I premiered my musical setting of Liber AL vel Legis at The Vortex, and the next morning we once again took our positions in the queue outside the embassy, this time successfully obtaining our visas 6 hours later. Pretty hectic stuff by anyone's reckoning, but ultimately well worth it to be able to see Siberia unfolding around us for four of the most relaxed travelling days I've ever had.

From our departure from Birmingham International Airport in the early hours of April 25th 2006 to the present moment, I have kept a diary of our various experiences, good and bad, for posterity. These travel pages document these experiences in varying degrees of detail. Please use the heading at the top of this page to navigate around these pages and read about our time away from the UK, in Russia, Mongolia and beyond...