Then, one by one, 40 cows appear at the top of the hill, and lope slowly down the dusty road, each t

Or to be more precise car rentals fort lauderdale airport – when s the best time of year to travel through Siberia? How am I going to get to Moscow? And why on earth do I want to take a train for six days to the remote port of Valdivostok anyway?
I asked myself these questions last year. After years of dreaming of taking this mother of all trips, the chance had presented itself. Commissioned to write a book on the world s best environmentally friendly holiday experiences, car rentals fort lauderdale airport and with the need to get to Asia to research some places there, I had both the time and the excuse to go.
As for the three questions, the when took care of itself. I d be setting off in August as I d already spent the first half of the year in Africa and I had to get the book finished car rentals fort lauderdale airport by December. There are those who say that for the real Siberian experience, you should travel in the winter, when the land
Second question: how to get to Moscow. The quick way, obviously, would be to fly. But this trip wasn t about getting there quickly. It was about getting there memorably. We wanted to journey for its own sake, enjoying the chance car rentals fort lauderdale airport encounters and random experiences that make real travel so
This only left one question why? Why head to Vladivostok, a city so polluted that two thirds of its suburbs are considered health hazards to live in? With a little bit of research we discovered that there was a better option The Transmongolian car rentals fort lauderdale airport Express following the same route as the
Transiberian for 4 days, before heading south to Beijing, through Mongolia. It was no contest – now we also had the chance to visit Outer Mongolia one of two places (the other being Timbuktu) synonymous with being the back of beyond.
car rentals fort lauderdale airport Furthermore, going this way gave us the chance to extend the trip to Hanoi, 9249 km from London. And so, questions answered and bags packed, car rentals fort lauderdale airport my girlfriend and I set off from London s St Pancras one August morning. After a boozy lunch in Paris, we head overnight to Vienna, passing through scenery ever more alpine as we speed east, before another overnight train to our first proper stop – Romania.
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Then, one by one, 40 cows appear at the top of the hill, and lope slowly down the dusty road, each turning off idly into whichever barn they spend the night. This we realise is what it really means to wait… till the cows come home.
We visit the self styled Highwayman , a muscle-bound shepherd living in a hut in the middle of nowhere with his wife, children, chickens, sheep, pigs and dogs. Sitting at his long wooden table, swatting away flies as we share his homemade cheese (mostly with the flies), we hear his life story,
Then he pulls an old shoe box from a shelf above his head and leafs thorough an assortment of faded, car rentals fort lauderdale airport dog-eared photographs. He shows us one, of an older son., and I ask where he is now. ' He works in London,' he beams through toothless grin, ' in advertising .
Our travels through eastern Europe continue to surprise. In Slovakia we visit a spa whose cryotherapy suite is billed as the coldest place on earth, and where you pay to exchange your clothes for wooly pants, gloves, socks and a headband, slide your feet into a pair of clogs, car rentals fort lauderdale airport add a paper facemask and then walk in slow circles around a small room where the temperature is -120 degrees centigrade.
Journeying through Ukraine we discover in Lvov one of the most beautiful and little known cities in Europe, yet are baffled by menus offering such delights as ' Luxurious Shapes' , ' Tongue of the Chatty Godmother' , and ' Pickled Lard' .We arrive early one morning in the capital Kiev and take a
metro to the main street, where we surface unawares into a huge crowd gathering for the country' car rentals fort lauderdale airport s Independence Day parade. The street is closed off, and every division of army, navy and air force is lining car rentals fort lauderdale airport up in front of us. We bag a spot and wait.
It begins with a roar from the crowd. Then two open top, grey 1960s Mercedes, number plates AA001 and AA002 drive slowly past the assembled military units, the President standing up in the back seat of one saluting, the head of the armed forces in the other. It looks and feels like a coup has
This is only accentuated when, division by division, the armed forces shoulder arms and march in goose-stepping, heel-clipping Eastern car rentals fort lauderdale airport Bloc fashion, up the street. Yet all this turns out to be just preamble to what the young English-speaking Ukrainian next to us explains are ' The Technics' .
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Minnesota – seems to have the requisite words for each WMD on display). He, along with every man, woman and child, becomes more enthusiastic the bigger and more deadly they became. ' This is for Russia' , he tells us ominously, by way of explanation.
And finally to Russia car rentals fort lauderdale airport itself, to Moscow, where the real journey car rentals fort lauderdale airport begins. An overpriced city with terrible weather and rude locals, but impressive art galleries – reminding us of London, somewhat. However, once we ve seen Red Square with its Lenin and Kruschev impersonators it s time to leave,
It takes 100 hours over five nights from Moscow to Ulan Bator. We ve splashed out on a first class cabin for two £400 each for the entire journey. We get two bunks, one of which folds up to give us a sofa, a little writing desk with a lamp on it, an arm chair, and a shared ensuite bathroom of sorts, which isn t up to much but does provide a rudimentary shower and sink of our own, but no loo.
For the first four days the scenery out of the window hardly changes – Russia it seems is one huge forest. We play cards, read books and chat to other travellers. From time to time, when our rapidly diminishing stash of warm vodka isn t quite cutting it, we stroll down to the restaurant car for a change of scene and a cold beer.
The restaurant car is an experience in itself. At the border with each country it is replaced by a different wagon, run by members of the country we are now travelling through. The Russian car is staffed by surly waitresses, the décor is faded, the food even more so. But they do serve dirt
cheap Russian champagne and vodka. car rentals fort lauderdale airport The Mongolian is hysterical, as if someone has been given an unlimited budget to spend in a novelty restaurant fittings shop, got drunk and blown the lot – coming back with an abundance of antlers, shields, pelts and wooden latticework screens. The food, is no better than the Russian. car rentals fort lauderdale airport The Chinese meanwhile, is modern and efficient, and you can get a passable car rentals fort lauderdale airport bowl of noodles.
Every five or so hours we pull into a station for 20 minutes, and everyone piles off to trade with the babushkas squat ladies who open their shopping bags and sell you cucumbers, tomatoes and other veg, dodgy sausages, dumplings stuffed with blueberries and cream cheese or potatoes
and cabbage, the odd dried and prehistoric looking fish, and a few strange things that I didn' t get round to eating. For my vegetarian girlfriend, for whom there s little on offer in the restaurants, these provide a much needed source of fresh sustenance, and she excels herself creating amazing
dishes from the babushka' s offerings, added to the dried soup, pickles, hot sauces and couscous she' s brought on board in Moscow and the free hot water supplied in each carriage by the samovar, another institution of Siberian travel.
It s basically an old coal fired metal boiler, located in the corridor and providing heating to each carriage, car rentals fort lauderdale airport with a tap for hot water whenever you want it. But for our ingenious and ever resourceful guard Do Yo Min, it s also an oven. Occasionally we would walk past his compartment car rentals fort lauderdale airport to see him
feasting on food way better than anything offered in the restaurant car, or prepared by ourselves. His trick? Unscrewing the front panel of the samovar, he would cook his food on the burning embers, either using the frying and saucepans he had bought with him, or directly grilling over the
The whole journey is quite disorientating, made all the more so by the incredibly confusing ways that time zones are dealt with. Over the course of the journey we pass through seven such zones. But while the timetable pinned to each carriage s corridor wall remains in moscow time throughout,
the catering car (and any station we stop in) run on whatever the current timezone is. Some passengers thus remain on Moscow time, while others are constantly adjusting, meaning that as the journey continues it becomes ever more chaotic, with people getting up while others are getting
After four days of unrelenting forests, we reach Lake Baikal, the world s largest lake. For the next couple of hours we circle its southern shores, before finally splitting from the route taken by the transiberian, and heading south towards Mongolia.
The scenery soon changes again, trading forests for barren steppe, itself equally unrelenting until a day or so later, and almost out of nowhere, we find ourselves pulling into the rundown outskirts of the polluted capital city of Ulan Bator. It s all a rather car rentals fort lauderdale airport monst