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

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This is a woman who poured her heart and soul in the book, her thoughts are there, good or bad, very realistic, sometimes funny, sometimes serious, sometimes sad, but in overal a great book. For a book about traveling around the world in 80 days there was very little information included that showed they had actually travelled in 80 trains. I certainly know not to go to a dry cleaner with my dirty clothes, but instead find a self-service laundry, if I want to have any money left. I would have preferred way more variety but we had huge chunks of book about China especially, Japan, Vietnam, Thailand, Mongolia, Tibet.

Worst of all, I have no doubt that she was sincere but it came across as a series of journal articles shared with the express view to inform but not alienate, to critique but not completely criticise. Hotjar sets this cookie to know whether a user is included in the data sampling defined by the site's pageview limit.It wasn't easy to get into at first, as she tended to skip around a bit, it wasn't exactly sequential, but once you get used to her style, it is really interesting and becomes a page-turner. Unexpected acts of kindness and generosity of spirit create a unique sense of community, “like we are a train family”, as one traveller tells her in Thailand. As other reviewers have noted too, she complains about the state of the trains when she could clearly afford better - if you don't like it, don't do it; if you want to do it, don't bitch about it.

She has written for the London Evening Standard, The Guardian, TIME magazine and The New York Times. WINNER OF THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC TRAVELLER AWARD FOR BEST TRAVEL BOOKSHORTLISTED FOR THE STANFORD DOLMAN TRAVEL BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD’Monisha Rajesh has chosen one of the best ways of seeing the world. To clarify, I don't care if she traveled third class, I care that she repeatedly complains about her decision. Monisha tells us how much she loves train travel, it's in her blood, she just has to drop everything and travel the world for 7 months by train.She is such a snob about older-is-better that she is predisposed to hate Japan’s clean, fast, punctual trains. In fact, travelling through Tibet and meeting Tibetans on a Chinese train, Rajesh is a little embarrassed by the profuse thanks she is given by Buddhists for “her” country’s protection of the Dalai Lama. Sadly, I found the book mundane and jaded, despite occasional attempts to inject some poetic context. This one is hard to rate - interesting read at times but I did find it hard to get through sometimes, and just wasn’t what I expected.

After flying to Vancouver they head east to Toronto, travelling 2,775 miles on The Canadian, “the most efficient way to absorb the vastness of the world’s second-largest country in one sitting”. So the couple hop on the Eurostar armed with Eurail passes and a fairly detailed plan for travels through Asia and America – but for some reason almost no plan for Europe, which quickly causes them problems. When Monisha Rajesh announced plans to circumnavigate the globe in eighty train journeys, she was met with wide-eyed disbelief.Unapproved journalists are not allowed to enter [North Korea] and newspapers regularly preyed upon foolish couples and American students willing to ham up tales of their visit for a tidy fee. The journey is one of constant movement and mayhem, as the pair strike up friendships and swap stories with the hilarious, irksome and ultimately endearing travellers they meet on board, all while taking in some of the earth’s most breathtaking views. A refreshing take on the world that isn’t from someone who isn’t from a conventional background and who is prepared to engage and interact with the people who she meets, rather than merely observe.

In North Korea] The chance of an uprising was still remote, as the money and power lay with the upper echelons of society, who were quite happy to maintain the status quo so long as it worked in their favor. With their attempt to be spontaneous, their journey gets off to a rocky start of fines and fees that makes her writing about Europe decidedly gloomy. She took out time to reach out to the surviving family members of The Hiroshima and Nagasaki blasts and has listed in detail about the Japanese technology and traditions including the one with the Geisha. Canadians don't take trains, they drive monster trucks from one province to the next, but that requires concentration on the road, and the need to stay awake. We have occasionally travelled in a group with an expert guide when it was dangerous or difficult to travel to a certain country.Just for the the fun of it, at the end of each chapter, I would have loved to know exactly which trains they'd caught, which number it was on the leg of the journey, the distance travelled and by how many hours. This was to be their longest journey, an epic eleven-day journey across the vastness that is Siberia before it neatly dropped them off in China.

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