The Trans-Siberian

The metro first, because it is the sight as much as the transport — stations built like state rooms.

We stayed at the Kremlin Lights hostel and met Han from China by tripping over his feet, which was enough. Burgers at Ketchup on the evening of 2 May, the night before my birthday and the first I have spent without family or old friends.

A couple joined our table after we offered them vodka. Somewhere after midnight the taxis had all gone and we got into an unmarked white minibus driven by a silent man who gave us bottled water, and it took us exactly where we wanted to go — a karaoke bar, until dawn. Han sang a German song and was the best of us.

The couple told us at the end that it was their wedding day.

Most of the actual birthday was spent horizontal. Mira showed us her city in the afternoon. The streets near the Kremlin were full of tanks rehearsing for Victory Day.

The archive records the date and the stop and nothing else, so this entry does the same rather than invent a day.

The obelisk outside the city marks the boundary between Europe and Asia, and this is where the trip crosses it.

As with Kazan, the archive keeps the date and not the day.

The longest single stretch of the whole route, and the last Russian stop before the Mongolian border.

The plan, from the beginning, was a train from a village near Mannheim to Beijing. It ended here.

The Chinese visas that were missing from our passports in Mannheim on day one never arrived — Silk Road politics, and no amount of standing in the right queue in Ulaanbaatar was going to change it.

So: not Beijing. We looked at a map and picked South Korea, about which neither of us knew anything beyond the fact that there are two of them.

The trip was better for it, which is not the lesson anyone wants to be taught by a visa office.