I’ve been on the road for 4 months now. Travelling for this length of time is great – what an adventure! – but it can come with some fatigue. I find myself having the same conversations over and over again and it’s tiresome. We travel to gain valuable life experience and see strange, wonderful things but sometimes we sound like a boring bunch when we talk. So here are the top tips for starting, having and maintaining great conversations with other nomads, whilst on the road!  Where are you from? This cliche question is the most common conversation starter from backpackers. And it gets a littl ..read more

The road is long and bumpy. It’s practically a dirt road, here just after the border crossing. I expected a reducing standard of development as we got deeper into Asia but I was surprised by the level. I wanted not to pre-suppose anything. A dirt road does not mean it’s a dirt place. And after the warmth I’d experienced from the Vietnamese people, I wanted to pay back the hospitality I’d received in kind. I wanted to adopt an appropriate mentality and that meant not judging a book by its cover. I was sure that if I approached things well, that somehow it would pay me back. I’d read about this ..read more

It is virtually impossible to know if you have reached your station on the trains in Northern Vietnam. There is very little signage at each place. I think this might have been playing on my mind, along with heavy sleep deprivation. I was awoken by the sight of a Vietnamese man entering our sleeper cabin at around 4am and begin to tap Kate on the shoulder, as she slept. As I saw this, I was paralyzed, unable to move. I shook my face, like a cartoon character would after being hit over the head. When I re-opened my eyes again he was gone – only a hallucination due to lack of sleep and stress. It ..read more

If you want to know what it feels like to be famous, go to China. You can walk around Beijing all day and hardly see a westerner and we stand out. Locals take sneaky photos of us on their camera phones. Others ask and introduce themselves, if they speak English and are confident enough to make the approach. In one train station in Nanning, we end up at the centre of a huddle of locals, all intrigued for a glimpse of our strange faces. One young woman who is studying business English tells us we are the first foreigners she’s ever met. She is polite, sociable and speaks with excellent grammar ..read more

We reached the ‘Balti Jaam’ with half an hour or so to spare, so we sat around in the waiting room, just killing time. I was curious as we sat, about the translation for train station and so I popped it into Google translate, selected Estonian to English and was surprised and concerned by the answer. “Must be a mistake.” I said to Kate. “What is?” “You know how we’ve been laughing about the name for the station –‘Balti Jaam’ all the time we’ve been here?”. It looked funny and sounded nothing like ‘train station’. It was like some kind of Estonian jive language, I had wondered. “Google says the ..read more

Excuse the pun but the Netherlands fell flat. Amsterdam is not the best place in the world and our search must continue. We boarded a bus early and watched out the window as the terrain developed before our eyes, converting infinite flatness, rows of precise cottages and clumps of thin, twiggy trees, into mildly undulating, rolling green pastures. The spring sun shone brightly through the cool chilly air. Abundance of life awaited, just around the corner, as we headed Eastbound and down. Long rows of solar panels, pepper the countryside next to tall, vast, grey wind turbines. Carrying their p ..read more

The first eventful border crossing came exiting Russia, as the man in the cabin next to ours was arrested. Russian customs officials boarded the train after dark and started their thorough departure checks. Dogs sniffed at my belongings, documents were checked and compartment walls knocked… It began with a gentle whimpering from one of the sniffer dogs, which alone didn’t entirely draw my attention. It was when the conversation took a turn that my ears pricked up. “Do you have any drugs with you” the officer asked, with a firm Russian accent. She was a stern looking woman, mid-thirties, with ..read more

We reached the ‘Balti Jaam’ with half an hour or so to spare, so we sat around in the waiting room, just killing time. I was curious as we sat, about the translation for train station and so I popped it into Google translate, selected Estonian to English and was surprised and concerned by the answer. “Must be a mistake.” I said to Kate. “What is?” “You know how we’ve been laughing about the name for the station –‘Balti Jaam’ all the time we’ve been here?”. It looked funny and sounded nothing like ‘train station’. It was like some kind of Estonian jive language, I had wondered. “Google says the ..read more

It is very alarming to receive a government emergency alert on your phone. Even more alarming when it’s in a language you don’t understand. From the alert arriving to us gaining and understanding of what it meant, took at least 30 very stressful minutes but more of that later… (Article photo: Make Everything Great Again – Vilnius, Lithuania) What kind of man leaves his wife and newly born child at home, to go off and travel on his own? I’m sure Paul Theroux would argue that he was working, when he wrote ‘The Great Railway Bazaar’ but as a self-employed writer, why create your schedule that way ..read more

Walking through the park in Krakow and this bloke had a huge long thing over his shoulder. At first I thought it was a barge pole – probably because it’s an item I’m familiar with, having been told by many women in my twenties, that they weren’t going to touch me with one  – but it wasn’t and then it clicked. “Are you a pole vaulter?” I said to the tall thin man, with a neatly trimmed tache. “Nine” he said in reply with a thick accent, “I’m a German but how did you know my name is Walter?”. That’s actually an old Billy Connelly joke and I was probably thinking about it as I walked through the ..read more