No, not another long post about the the post October 1917 civil war in Russia or the importance of early twentieth century East Asian history.

I have, over the past couple of years, accumulated too much leave. So much that I now get emails from HR asking me to get rid of some of it.

Well J and I could do with a long holiday somewhere. We’ve had various plans, Spain, Central Europe, and the like, or perhaps Vietnam and Cambodia but we’re feeling the need for the exotic, genuine travelling like our Lao trip.

We had had plans for Syria to look at Byzantine and Crusader remains and then to travel down through Jordan to end up at St Catherine’s in Egypt.

We started planning that trip before the Arab spring, but even if there was to be a peace settlement in Syria tomorrow, there has been too much blood to make the trip practical or enjoyable, even though the Jordanian and Egyptian portions are certainly possible.

So we thought about South America. And then we saw an article in the weekend paper about someone who went horse riding in Mongolia.

Now I tend to consider horses nasty smelly bitey dangerous things, but perhaps because I’d been reading about Ungern von Sternberg and Mongolia I read the article.

And that sparked the thought, why don’t we go to Europe via the Transiberian ? We like trains, it’s most definitely exotic, and we’ll have a range of experiences to blog and write about?

The man in seat 61 confirmed we weren’t being in the least bit stupid, so we’re now planning a trip for next year, starting from Beijing – we did think about Ho-ChiMinh as a starting point, but thought that might be better as a S E Asia trip -with the aim of ending up in London for a week or so’s R+R before flying back …