Greetings from far away lands! Eight days gone and over ten thousand miles of railtrack behind us. And this, shamefully, is our first entry. In our defence, other than a rainy Sunday in Moscow, today is the first day that we haven't been on a train since we left.
Where to begin... The beginning, I suppose, is as good as anywhere. We left London last Thursday on the Eurostar bound for Brussels. From there we raced to meet our connection to Cologne; 18 minutes really doesn't give you much leeway.
I'm racing through here, with nothing much to report, other than to say that the Eurostar was emphatically not the best service of our journey - broken air-con in an English heatwave - and, flying in the face of all our well-loved clichés about German efficiency, the train into Cologne was an hour late. But what a train it was. So nice, we were almost glad we had an extra hour to enjoy it.
A quick bratwurst-with-mustard stop and then we boarded our first sleeper train, to Warsaw. A longer than anticipated celebratory toast in the restaurant car meant that our fellow passengers were already asleep by the time we returned to our six berth cabin. Which sounds like we were drunk, which we weren't, although I did have some strange dreams involving showing my passport to a Polish Immigration Official in the middle of the night.
Flashes of light through the curtains, glimpses of sunny Polish fields brought us to our senses early the next morning. It seems, at speed, to be a beautiful country; one caught - like those of our later journey - straddling various stages of agricultural, industrial and post-industrial economies simultaneously.
We arrived in Warsaw in good time for us to have a leisurely breakfast before leaving for Moscow. Until we realised that we were at the wrong station.
A story could be told here involving six Polish bureaucrats, two noble travellers rushing between booths across the concourse (and back again!) and a very nice lady in the Tourist Information office, but I think you can piece that together yourselves. The happy ending was a short tram ride (more rails!) and two relieved travellers boarding a train to Moscow.
Ensconced in the luxury of a three berth cabin and noone to make it a crowd, we took in some more stunning Polish countryside until it was time to enter Belarus.
There is something uniquely satisfying, not to mention nineteenth-century romantic, about travelling these great distances by train: you feel each mile you travel.
And, as the distance registers, you feel a ‘shedding’, removing the residue of where you've been, preparing you for your next destination.
And so, having enjoyed for the first (second, third and eighth) time the wide array of food being sold by people on each platform we passed and having changed bogies to fit the slimline Russian railtracks, we reached Moscow.
Moscow warrants, and will get, its own entry. For now, suffice it to say, our hosts Asaya and Eugene were wonderfully welcoming, with a limitless supply of Russian pancakes and black fruit tea.
And then, finally, we were on the Trans-Siberian Railway; Train No. 10: “Baikal”. By now we were seasoned sleeper veterans, at one with the ways of the mattress. Unfortunately I don't think we proved this to the Russian soldiers sharing our cabin - exploding beer bottles, broken glass, a frantic attempt to stop beer going near anything valuable (it didn't) - it was, overall, quite an entrance.
They seemed to forgive us. Not long after, they shared their sausage, cheese and, inevitably, vodka with us. This quickly became the pattern of the week: staring out the window, watching Russia pass by, and reading books during the day; drinking vodka and trying to converse with two Russian soldiers who spoke no more English than we do Russian by night.
In a matter entirely unrelated to vodka, one night Georgia managed to find the wrong cabin when returning from the toilet and was one ladder-rung away from getting into bed with the man next door. He yelled, she screamed, Andrei, Leo and I - when we found out the next day - laughed.
It was a wonderful journey, watching the landscape of western, european russia gradually tranform into that of the east - asian russia, from the steppes and the taiga in the north to the great mountains in the south, towards Mongolia and China.
The food at the stations continued to get better as we moved across: pinenuts in their cones, smoked fish, pastries, bread, chicken, guerkins, sausage... an amazing array, all shared between the four of us, washed down with... well, you guessed it.
And finally, after eight days on the move, we arrived in Irkutsk in South East Siberia, one of the most remarkable places I've ever seen.
In its day, it was a wealthy trading post, with beautiful buildings and a great cultural scene, leading to its nickname, the “Paris of Siberia”. This was further enforced by the settlement here of a large number of the Decembrists - liberal members of the Moscow aristocracy who attempted a coup against the Tsar in a push for greater democracy (December 1825) and were then punished by death, imprisonment or exile in Siberia.
Many of these old buildings still survive - intricate, delicate and made out of wood - but are charmingly delapidated, paint peeling off the walls and a thick layer of dust over the brightly coloured walls. Think a neglected Louisiana town after an apocalypse.
And so ends our first entry and with it our first week away. There'll be more to say about Irkutsk, Moscow and the next few places we're visiting soon, but for now that's it. In the words of our dear friend Lenin,
When the trains stop, that will be the end.