Days 14 to 20, 14-20 Sept 2017, Moscow, 3592 km from Dublin. Want to hear the gods laugh? Well, tell them your plans. My plan was to spend a day or so in Moscow, then to St Petersburg to see the architecture but mainly to spend 2 days in the Hermitage.[…]
Days 12 & 13, 12th to 13th Sept 2017 – Minsk, Belarus I left Warsaw for Minsk at 2am in the morning from an outlying station, not in the centre of the city. It was a pretty grim utilitarian place with no shops open at that time of night. The[…]
Days 7 to 11, 7th to 11th Sept 2017 – Warsaw. I’m writing this on my last day in Warsaw and I’ll be catching the train to Minsk in Belarus later on this evening. I find I can recollect better when memory has consolidated eve0nts of the day and my hippocampus has[…]
Days 4, 5 & 6 – Berlin The journey from Cologne to Berlin was my first longish trip, 6 hrs in all. The first hour or so was a bit boring and I got restless thinking about the hours ahead but the creaking sound of the train moving, and also[…]
Day 1 – 1 Sept 2017 I locked my hall door at 6:45am this morning and started walking down Gardiner Street to get the 53 bus to Dublin Ferryport. I reached the intersection of Summerhill, when, to my left, a sudden surprising burst of colour grabbed my attention. It was[…]
Well, it’s almost time. In less than a week, at 7am on Friday 1st September, I’ll close my hall door for the last time until mid December and head off by bus for the Dublin Ferryport with my backpack, under 10kg, on my back. I’ll be taking the first step[…]
In my last blog, I said I would be going across Russia and then leaving from Vladivostok to travel by ferry to Korea Japan and China. On reflection, I have decided to eliminate the Korean and Japanese legs of my journey. This is mainly because of the time it would[…]
First of all, I’m not a train nut. I don’t wear an anorak and stand in the rain at the end of railway platforms and scribble down passing train numbers in a cheap notebook with a blunt stubby pencil while peering myopically through my rain splattered specs and wondering if[…]
Last Autumn, as I noticed the evenings drawing in, I reflected that less than a year ago I was traipsing around China with a pack on my back and without too many worries in the world. I felt a familiar itch in the soles of my feet and said to[…]
Jaysus, I’m so hungry I’d ate a nun’s arse through a convent wall, I said to myself as I shumbled out of the damp dreary Dublin dusk into the bright warm welcoming embrace of Cornucopia. I marvelled, as I often do, at the glorious incongruity of the very existence of[…]
The weather is slowly changing here in Hong Kong. A few days ago, there was a very slight, almost imperceptible, nip in the air. Everybody started wearing coats and long trousers. “It’s freezing” I overheard several people say. Yet, the mercury hardly dipped below 25 degrees C. The humidity has[…]
I had about a thousand word article written for this blog but unfortunately the dreaded cybergobbler devoured it. Not sure how I managed this but I was trying to free up space and deleted it accidentally. I had a local copy on my iPad and not my Dropbox and deleted[…]
