On BBC1’s Breakfast this morning there was a piece about www.ozbus.co.uk who have started a London to Sydney bus service. Simon Calder, The Independent’s travel correspondent, was being interviewed about it and was asked how people could be sure they’d cope with 85 days on a bus. His suggestion was that they try the Scotland to London Megabus service first! It made me wonder whether the old saying “all publicity is good publicity” is actually true?

Crazy as the idea sounds it does have an appeal. A few years ago I travelled overland to Beijing on the Trans-Siberian Railway. The journey should have taken 7 days but infact took 8 because floods in Northern China meant a long detour had to made. Travelling like this means that you actually see the slowly evolving physical appearance of people along the way – from Western to Chinese. You see the changing landscape, plain, tundra, mountains etc. The train stops fairly frequently, not for long enough to leave whatever station you’re at but long enough to get off and stare at things and perhaps buy something. Irktusk is at the southern tip of Lake Baikal and on the platform here are woman selling smoked Ormul which they carry threaded onto long twigs. The fish is absolutely superb and I wished I’d bought more. Talking of food this is one of the worst aspects of the journey. The dining car is Russian for the first 5 days and its food is from the old Russian school of cookery – take one cabbage, boil for several hours, serve with a dollop of tomato sauce on top and a piece of ‘meat’ which was proabably last used as the sole of a shoe before being served up! I gave up going to the dining car and lived off stuff I bought at the stations where we stopped. Had I known it was like this I would have carried some provisions such as tinned corned beef etc. Once the train crosses into China a Chinese dining car is attached and it all gets better!

China is fascinating. I avoided western hotels and establishments there staying in a hotel in the hutongs (lanes) in Beijing. No English spoken and no English written. My first mistake occured with an hour or so of arrival, I picked up the tv remote control which only bore Chinese characters, pointed it at the tv and kept clicking – nothing. I went to reception and signed that I wanted someone to come with me to my room, they came and I pointed the tv remote at the television and clicked to show that nothing happened. They weren’t very polite, they laughed at me :-) That remote was for the air con, the tv remote was in a drawer! I ate in the local restaurants and never saw another westerner. Ordering was fun since I couldn’t read a menu or speak the language. Other diners were very tolerant of me walking around their tables and pointing at anything which looked nice and indicating I’d have that too. Visits to these restaurants were a cross between a visit to a restaurant and a zoo. One wall was lined with tanks and cages holding small animals, tortoises, snakes and fish. Diners pointed to the specimen they wanted which was then taken to the kitchen, despatched, cooked and sent back to the diner. The only thing which I did this with was a fish which came back whole and steamed. The great achievement was being able to eat it entirely with chopsticks.