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

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You can’t ask any awkward questions, you have to be quiet and be respectful when asking any questions. As a journalist it’s your job to ask questions, to take photos and to find out more, but in North Korea, you can’t. Rajesh and her fiancé trace Sir Harold’s journey in the book. He comes across as a remarkable character who many years later, invited a remorseful Mikio Kinosh*ta, an engineer with the Japanese Imperial Army to London. Additionally, the encounter with Toshiko Yamasaki, the daughter of Tsutomu Yamaguchi, the only victim to have survived being at ground zero of both atomic bombs is also thought provoking.

Around the World in 80 Trains - Bloomsbury Publishing

A silk sleeping sheet, it’s great in the winter to keep the cold out and in the summer it keeps you cool. A silk sheet also bundles down into fist size! North Korea, must have been an odd experience, was there anything that completely threw you about the country? When Monisha Rajesh announced plans to circumnavigate the globe in eighty train journeys, she was met with wide-eyed disbelief. But it wasn't long before she was carefully plotting a route that would cover 45,000 miles - almost twice the circumference of the earth - coasting along the world's most remarkable railways; from the cloud-skimming heights of Tibet's Qinghai railway to silk-sheeted splendour on the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express. Time and again [in India] I encountered so-called 'godmen' exploiting the poor and vulnerable, priests extracting money for nothing, and blind faith leading to disappointment." 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.

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The only issue I could take up with Rajesh is that of the book’s title, which is of course a take on Jules Verne’s classic ‘Around the World in Eighty Days’. Being so sensitive and hostile to cliches, she, for some reason, chose to use one in the title not just of this book, but of her previous travelogue too. Why 80 trains and not 50 or a hundred? With all her considerable writer’s skills and imagination, she could have come up with something more original, I am sure. Safer? Not always. While she’s with Jem on a commuter service outside Moscow, two men spit at her legs; on the Trans-Mongolian, while Jem is elsewhere, the provodnik (guard) rescues her from a groper. Then there’s an additional danger for a writer: that travelling in company means travelling in a bubble. One of her predecessors on the long-distance train, Paul Theroux, has said firmly (in The Old Patagonian Express) that “to see, to examine, to assess, you have to be alone and unencumbered”. Not necessarily. You just leave the fiancé buried in a book, and seize every chance to chat up the locals. I had put this trip off, I felt like I couldn’t do it one book, no one had done an around the world train trip before!

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

Ffestiniog Travel (01766 772030; ffestiniogtravel.com) offers up to 30 escorted rail tours a year. Profits help support the Ffestiniog and Welsh Highland Railways. It’s a lot harder on a train to shape people’s views, we can see the countryside, we can see people doing normal things. It’s not this bright showcase of people dancing in a square, its normal life and you can see the poverty. Leaning out of doorways, perching on steps and sleeping in the odd linen cupboard, I covered the length and breadth of the country in four months and was drawn into its warm embrace by the whole railway family – from her royal highness the Deccan Queen and the sleek and chic Durontos, to the puffing and panting toy trains and thundering Rajdhanis. I hung from the badly behaved Mumbai commuters, had sweet dreams in the Indian Maharaja’s double bed, and witnessed orthopaedic surgery on the world’s first hospital train. Delightful ... Rajesh is not only blessed with an elegant style, but is witty and ever ready for a bit of self-deprecation ( Spectator) Much of the trip remains open: I want there to be spontaneity. But the penultimate leg of the trip should take me winding across China and on to the ancient route of the silk traders through Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. Visas permitting, I will return to Europe through Iran and Turkey, and would like to conclude the trip with the Venice to London route. And I will be sending regular dispatches to the Discover section of The Sunday Telegraph.The trains in Japan are so quiet, there’s very little energy on Japanese trains. They’re very mindful of other people, and they’re very clean and too perfect, a little dull to be honest.

Around the World in 80 Trains Around the World in 80 Trains

Karen, a Canadian, explained a few things that we would never have learnt about. She joined us for dinner, she was lovely, she gave us so much history of Canadian trains. I never knew that Chinese people built the railways as slaves. Also that if anyone comes from the trees they can flag down the train and the train will legally have to stop for them. There are many interesting little snippets in the book, like the fact that two streetcars still run in Japan, having survived the atomic bomb in Hiroshima, or the Quinghai line from Xining to Lhasa, the highest in the world, reaching 5,072m above sea level. Though railway facts are not this book’s main tenet. Rajesh [is] a rare rising star of the genre . She has a simple and easy style, she sees everything and listens to everyone, she's funny when she wants to be and serious when she needs to be, and she keeps the whole thing barrelling along like a wonderful dinner party conversation (Marcus Berkmann Daily Mail) Vittoria listened to the deadpan automated voice, and smirked, throwing both hands in the air before speaking into the app. Before leaving London, she had interviewed Sir Harold Atcherley, a surviving POW (he has since died) who had recently played host to one of his old foes because “you can’t go on hating people”. Atcherley told her that “equal proportions of good, indifferent and lousy people exist in any group, any country”. In Hiroshima, she times her arrival for memorial services marking the 70th anniversary of the dropping of the bomb, and seeks out 81-year-old Tetsushi Yonezawa, who tells her: “If I had stayed in Hiroshima, I would have died. These trains saved my life.”

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it now dawned on me why long distance train travel held such appeal. No other mode of travel combined my two favourite pastimes: travelling the world and lying in bed. p116 I learned a lot about different trains. The fastest train in the world is in Beijing. The top speed of this train is 268 miles per hour. It would be an amazing experience for me to travel that fast. I learned there is a train called the Reunification Express in Vietnam. It goes from Hanoi to Saigon in Vietnam. I never even knew that train travel is available in Vietnam. I would love to ride on the Venice Orient Express. It travels through Italy and all of Europe . I would love to see the Dolomite mountains in Italy while riding on this train. More diverse travel writers would make such a difference with travel and make people more understanding. I was unaware of what it’s like for people to travel on trains with disabilities. Only when people with disabilities started writing to me to ask how certain journeys would be with a disability did I realise. Now I’m conscious of it and ensure I focus on how my experience would be for someone who was disabled.