Take the train, not a plane. I’d spent most of the night acutely aware of every bump in the rails, every bridge, every station; it was the beginning of a very long rail journey that would ultimately take me to Vietnam and the train...
Feldkirch, Austria. Feldkirch is a pretty little Austrian town near the German, Switzerland and Liechtenstein borders, therefore a great place to base yourself! After our three-week stay in Konstanz, Germany, our friend Tom drove us to Feldkirch passing through all the aforementioned countries in a...
Gazing at the departure board at Hamburg station I realised my folly: I may have booked the wrong route. I had a ticket from Travemünde, northern Germany, to Luxembourg, part of a two-day rail trip to get to Konstanz in the south of Germany –...
Copenhagen to Finland, via Stockholm A fascinating bridge links Denmark and Sweden across the Øresund Sound, it vanishes under the water as a tunnel only to reappear on a spit of land half way across to sweep over the final half to Sweden. The Øresund Bridge turns into...
By train to Copenhagen The lure to head to north was too much, Scandinavia called me. So there I was, stood on platform 5b at Hamburg station waiting for the InterCity Express 33 to transport me to Copenhagen. My time in Hamburg had been brief, I’d...
Miniatur Wunderland, Hamburg The world’s biggest model railway? As far as tourist sites in Hamburg go, the Miniatur Wunderland had my name written all over it! I went as a train geek – I will confess now, unashamedly, as having a Hornby model railway as...
Perhentian Islands, Malaysia White sand beaches, crystal clear azure water and very low-key development, it sure sounds like paradise, right? The Perhentians are two small islands off the north-eastern coast of Peninsula Malaysia; they had been on our radar since our last trip to Malaysia:...
It was time to catch the train again! We had three days before our flight back to Bangkok; having opted to fly out of Mandalay, we now had to get there. Our arrival into Naungshwe (for Lake Inle) had been by bus over the mountains,...
More than most other forms of transport, the train immerses the traveller into the country it crosses. A slow train can be a window into the lives of the people and an expression of how the country works. The Myanmar rail network is all this,...
I’d been off the rails for too long! Considering that the first three and a half months were travelled exclusively by train, we hadn’t been on one for seven weeks while traversing southern Vietnam and Cambodia. I was itching to be rocked along again. The...
Two things drew us to Battambang, a wildlife spectacle and an opportunity to ride a train {currently almost the only opportunity really, more on that later} in Cambodia. A six hour bus journey, booked through our accommodation in Phnom Penh, transported us through the Cambodian...
Two months of travel in China drew to a close, it was time to move on, with a few days left on our visas we departed Yangshuo on the bus to Guilin, a journey we had made a few times since basing ourselves in the...
After our little break in Hong Kong we headed back to mainland China just before christmas. Our destination was Yangshuo, we took a train from Hung Hom to Guangzhou East which was a pleasant, smooth ride complete with Hong Kong egg tarts and a cup...
Shanghai. What is it like to experience toxic smog? We spent six days in Shanghai in total, after our initial introductory exploration of the city we got stuck into sight-seeing, dipping into our guide-book for ideas. The glittering views of our first couple of days soon...
The Leshan Grand Buddha is the largest carved stone Buddha in the world. He was carved from a cliff overlooking a wide confluence of rivers 1200 years ago and gazes out with a calm expression on his face. Yet not all of the Leshan Buddha...
Chengdu wasn’t actually part of our plans for China, it was in the opposite direction to everywhere else we were going but it seemed a marvellous idea after a few beers in a bar in Xi’an and we found ourselves joining our friends, occupying a...
