While I’d been filling in forms and moving from one counter to another, Jem had come up with a list of sights and cities that he wanted to visit, handing it to me over lunch in a cafe in the Marais.

Around the World in 80 Trains: A 45,000-Mile Adventure|eBook Around the World in 80 Trains: A 45,000-Mile Adventure|eBook

I spent a day heading to the suburbs of Moscow, we got spat at. We turned up at a distant town, people just stared at us, it felt very intimidating. We later read that it said we shouldn’t have travelled on suburban trains.The author is very biased and has very strong opinions which makes the book a bit spoilt. I would have expected her to be a bit more experienced, but yet she falls in the usual typical tourist traps (which I was hoping wouldn’t be covered in this book) – not doing the research about places, being overcharged by a taxi driver who didn’t set the meter, expecting Chinese people to speak English and hoping it would be easy to navigate and instead spending time in Beijing shopping for cardigans in Zara. If reading this makes you feel upset, the book isn’t for you. Monisha Rajesh is a British journalist whose writing has appeared in Time magazine, the New York Times, the Guardian and the Sunday Telegraph, in which she wrote a column about her journey around the world. Her first book Around India in 80 Trains (2012) was named one of the Independent's best books on India. Born in Norfolk and mostly raised in Yorkshire – with a brief stint in Madras – she currently lives in London with her husband and daughter. To make it worse, Rajesh travelled in the company of her husband Jem – a posh London lad, who, in her own words, was “not used to bags that were not on wheels”, which made the whole endeavour resemble a leisurely family holiday, at the publisher’s or someone else’s expense, camouflaged as a travelogue. The trans-Mongolian express! You spend nine days on board, the change in landscapes is amazing! Starting in Moscow in the summer, with no snow you go through four days of leafless beech trees and occasional forests. Rajesh, born in Norfolk in 1982, the daughter of two Indian doctors whose training sent them all over England, was perhaps fated to be a traveller. For her debut, Around India in 80 Trains (2012), a journey she finished alone after falling out with her companion, she endured harassment that’s inadequately described on the subcontinent as “Eve-teasing”.

Around the World in 80 Trains : A 45,000-Mile Adventure Around the World in 80 Trains : A 45,000-Mile Adventure

They begin with a brisk tour of Europe, ending up in Moscow, where they take some nightmarish taxi journeys to find Patriot Park, a “military Disneyland” recently opened by President Putin. They then catch the Trans-Mongolian Railway to Beijing, an 11-day journey including stopovers in Irkutsk, Siberia, to visit Lake Baikal (“the deepest, oldest and largest freshwater lake in the world”) and Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, which turns out to be something of a disappointment: “The city’s old culture … had collapsed under the might of … KFCs and an Imax.” Second, why do books put photo sections mid-sentence. It's a chapter book, surely you could put them between chapters? We don’t have that much time in Moscow,’ said Jem, ‘just a couple of days, as we’re taking the Trans-Mongolian to Beijing and it only departs on certain days of the week.’ PDF / EPUB File Name: Around_the_World_in_80_Trains_A_45000-Mile_Adventure_-_Monisha_Rajesh.pdf, Around_the_World_in_80_Trains_A_45000-Mile_Adventure_-_Monisha_Rajesh.epub I really enjoyed China, its a mixture of the best of Japanese trains and more lively trains. They have brand new high-speed trains, with smoking on board and huge dinner parties!Monisha Rajesh makes every country and their attractions sound so appealing. I would never even think about travelling to Tibet or North Korea. I would like to visit these countries because of her descriptive writing. There is the Potala palace in Tibet. This palace contains the Dalai Lama's throne. Tibet also has many butter sculptures made by monks. I think this would be interesting to see. I would love to see all of these things in person. I would love to visit Pyongyang to attend a film festival. I love eating new dishes. I would love to try the yak curry in Tibet. I would even try the cumin bread that is available on the silk road in Asia. A relentlessly curious and wonderfully descriptive writer … [Rajesh] offers us a never-ending series of Theroux-esque, quirky anecdotes … Remarkably engaging … If you fancy learning about global travel in the relative slow lane, try boarding this carriage and staring out the window – here you can view the world through Rajesh's eyes, as she takes us on a lazy, time-bending meander in search of authenticity and humanity”— Geographical Your latest book “Around the world in 80 trains” has recently won the Nat Geo book of the year, how did you go about planning such an awesome journey? Gaudí’s House … Valencia … Lourdes? Really?’ I asked, as the waiter placed a basket of freshly sliced baguette on our table along with two paper placemats and a carafe of water.