“Although the temperature outside is now well below zero, I am lying in the snug and sweaty darkness of a seriously overheated Chinese train compartment. After about half an hour tossing and turning I have a bit of a moment and finally lose my self-control in a high-temperature-induced panic. I feel an urgent and desperate need for fresh air. I need to do something, anything, so I grab my tool kit, get out some pliers and begin to remove the bolts around the frame that obviously keeps the window closed. There are eight bolts, and I remove them one by one and put them each carefully on my table like I’m working on an unexploded bomb. My compartment door is locked, so as long as we don’t stop at a station I can continue my work unobserved by Li and Chen, my minders. The bolts are now all out, but the window still won’t open. I push, shove and try and slide it in all directions. Nothing happens. Taking a break, and sitting on my berth I scratch my head and wish that I were a qualified engineer. Why won’t the window open? I realise that I’m going to have to admit defeat to living in a sauna. But then in a horrible single moment of mechanical deduction, the reason it’s not opening finally dawns on me. This window is fixed shut and, unlike the windows in the corri­dor, has no opening part. What I have actually done is to unbolt the entire window and its frame from the carriage. At this moment there is nothing other than ice and grime holding the window onto the rattling and bumping carriage as we sway down the line towards Irkutsk.”

It would of course have been highly amusing to imagine me trying to explain to the Chinese officials why the window in my compartment was absent from the train in the heart of the Siberian winter. But the two viewpoints of fear and hilarity also made me think about the richness of adventure. When I first started out as a long range rail traveller I tried to plan everything so carefully. The smallest problem stood out as a personal crisis, and I was always worrying about something trivial. It is only over time and with some miles under my belt that I now see most problems as actually generally good things. Not only do they give me something interesting to write about, but they seem to make me a better traveller. So as I have raised my game as a rail adventurer, and now an author, I have actually learned to embrace the odd crisis. I’m also a bit more chilled out now too. By accepting that these things will happen and I will overcome them, I seem to become a more open minded, confident, and a more flexible person.

My first book is about my rediscovery of the joy of long distance train travel. After a longer gestation period than I had planned, it was finally published this week. Trans-Siberian Adventures is based on my first ever journey across Siberia – from Edinburgh to Shanghai.

My original blog has proved to be a useful journal, but the book has allowed me to take my writing to a new place – one that perhaps only two years ago I would not have imagined. I have been able to write about my experiences in much more detail and to provide what I feel is a more real insight into life on the rails. Blogging on the move has become a daily ritual of my travel, but like an artist, this is really just an initial sketch, rather than the full painting.

I feel I should point out that the photo at the top of this post might imply my impending custody in a Korean jail. I have to tell you that nothing could be further from the truth. I found Korean policemen to be the nicest law enforcement agency that I have ever encountered. This gives me a closing thought, one that I also mention in the book. It doesn’t matter if you don’t speak a word of the same
language; nearly all people in this world are innately kind and generous to
strangers. Don’t be put off travel by what you read in the newspapers.

I really hope you enjoy my book and that it might inspire you to give long range rail adventure a try. You can read more about Trans-Siberian Adventures on my book page. Please let me know what you think.

They asked me if I minded doing a short interview to help introduce myself to their readers. I found it really interesting to do this as I don’t get asked about my motivations very much. If you are interested, you can read it here.
Without wishing to sound too deep, the last few weeks have also proved to be a really good chance to take a step back and think about what I’m trying to achieve and what really I believe in – if you like, my adventure “DNA”. I think this has grown, or possibly even mutated, over the last few years and I will explain why.

When I first set out on the rails I was on a bit of a personal crusade. Finally getting away from the predictability of corporate life, to begin with my journey was one of escapism. But after a couple of years on these journeys I realised that I was getting almost as much pleasure from writing and sharing my adventures with others as from actually completing them. Did this make me a writer rather than a traveller? I like to think that writing is still a bi-product of my adventures, but they are now so inter twined that one needs the other.

As things progressed I decided I needed a way of describing to others what it was that I now did. It might seem trivial, but some people seem to judge others by their job title. Plus there were companies who wanted me to write for them. What did they expect me to be? Was I an explorer? An adventurer? A traveller? A writer? Or was it much simpler than this – was I just an escapist? I struggled with this at first. These labels can be tricky and mean quite different things to different people. Furthermore, social media these days is positively crowded with people calling themselves “explorers” and “adventurers”.

In the space of one month in 2014 I met two people with very different outlooks, both of whom shaped my thinking. The first was Sir Ran Fiennes, without doubt a man who lives up to his tag as “the world’s greatest living explorer”. There was obviously no way I felt I was going to call myself an explorer after that meeting. I haven’t been to either pole, can’t ski and I get a headache when climbing Kilimanjaro. So if I wasn’t an explorer what was I? Then I met Robert Twigger (one of my favourite authors and a source of much writing inspiration), and he said he felt he was an explorer by the fact that he fulfilled the role of bringing information back from his travels and telling others about his experiences. I do that too, all the time.

After much deliberation I ended up settling for describing myself as being an adventurer, as it feels closest to what I feel I actually do. But I still worry that this tag has issues. I recently read a great post by Tom Allen on his blog that highlights the problems with this. It’s called Debunking the myth of the modern day “adventurer”. Read it if you have time, but in summary Tom highlights how people can quickly end up spending more time marketing than exploring.

As a result of all this reflection I have also realised that I might actually have a point of difference. My adventures are challenging at times, but they are actually very accessible to most. After all, you don’t need to be a hardened polar explorer or fitter than a Sherpa to travel somewhere far away by train. Rail adventures are not really about uniqueness or massive human difficulty, but about imagination and accessibility – albeit with a need for some time, focus and determination. My audience and those I interact with are really interesting. I’m not just communicating to people enjoying reading about my journeys, but to people that I hope will choose to get out there and have adventures of their own. All I have done is helped to light the blue touch paper.

So next time at I’m at a dinner party and someone asks me what I do I shall look them in the eye and tell them that I’m a rail adventurer and be rather happy about that.