The book really gets into gear in N. Korea and China, and captures so much of the romance of train travel including the numerous little epiphanies about oneself while touching the edge of inner stillness in a moving train. Blessedly, not too much of that too. So, Monisha is no Paul Theroux, that is a high bar, but this is an engaging enough travelogue. There is a little bit of history thrown in at certain places like Japan and Thailand which really do add to the book. I especially liked the chapter on North Korea. I had no idea that the guided tour allowed such travel by train in that country. China's cultural Revolution unfolded in the mid-1960s, driving the desecration of almost all of Tibet's monasteries, destroying libraries and paintings." Delightful ... Rajesh is not only blessed with an elegant style, but is witty and ever ready for a bit of self-deprecation ( Spectator)

Monisha Rajesh: Around the world in 80 trains — Dure Magazine Monisha Rajesh: Around the world in 80 trains — Dure Magazine

Safer? Not always. While she’s with Jem on a commuter service outside Moscow, two men spit at her legs; on the Trans-Mongolian, while Jem is elsewhere, the provodnik (guard) rescues her from a groper. Then there’s an additional danger for a writer: that travelling in company means travelling in a bubble. One of her predecessors on the long-distance train, Paul Theroux, has said firmly (in The Old Patagonian Express) that “to see, to examine, to assess, you have to be alone and unencumbered”. Not necessarily. You just leave the fiancé buried in a book, and seize every chance to chat up the locals. To make it worse, Rajesh travelled in the company of her husband Jem – a posh London lad, who, in her own words, was “not used to bags that were not on wheels”, which made the whole endeavour resemble a leisurely family holiday, at the publisher’s or someone else’s expense, camouflaged as a travelogue. Book Genre: Adventure, Autobiography, Biography, Biography Memoir, British Literature, European Literature, Memoir, Nonfiction, Railways, Trains, Travel, Travelogue

🍪 Privacy & Transparency

Pulling out her phone, she began speaking into her Google Translate app before showing me the screen, which now read: What would you like to do? The truth was that I wasn’t sure I’d be fine. In India, I’d been groped on a night train, cornered in a station, chased down a platform, stared at, leered at, spat at, shouted at, sworn at, and spent numerous nights crouched in hotels after dark with my bags piled up against the door. Above all, I didn’t want to leave Jem behind. What a waste it would be, to travel around Europe, Russia, Mongolia, China, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Japan, Canada, and America, with no one to build and share memories. A silk sleeping sheet, it’s great in the winter to keep the cold out and in the summer it keeps you cool. A silk sheet also bundles down into fist size!

Rail travel: Around the world in 80 trains - Telegraph

The trains in Japan are so quiet, there’s very little energy on Japanese trains. They’re very mindful of other people, and they’re very clean and too perfect, a little dull to be honest. North Korea, must have been an odd experience, was there anything that completely threw you about the country? Karen, a Canadian, explained a few things that we would never have learnt about. She joined us for dinner, she was lovely, she gave us so much history of Canadian trains. I never knew that Chinese people built the railways as slaves. Also that if anyone comes from the trees they can flag down the train and the train will legally have to stop for them.Train travel around the world can differ immensely, was there any countries or rail journeys that were a surprise?

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

It’s a lot harder on a train to shape people’s views, we can see the countryside, we can see people doing normal things. It’s not this bright showcase of people dancing in a square, its normal life and you can see the poverty. Your latest book “Around the world in 80 trains” has recently won the Nat Geo book of the year, how did you go about planning such an awesome journey? The young Uighurs were regularly stopped and asked to hand over their phones for examination, and CCTV cameras above mosques ensured they didn't try to enter to pray."With the coronavirus pandemic meaning many people in the UK will staycation this year, do you have any recommendations for train travel in the UK? I loved Monisha Rajesh's Around India in 80 trains, and have been looking forward to reading this one. It can't really be read as a sequel because there's little apart from the author's experience in Indian trains, that gets carried forward to this book.

Book review: ‘Around the World in 80 Trains’ by Monisha

She glimpses an enthralling swirl of cultures and landscapes on a journey filled with memorable brief encounters: “Trains are rolling libraries of information, and all it takes is to reach out to passengers to bind together their tales.” What’s amazing about train journeys, you see people facial figures change you see we’re not very different to people. When you airlift out of one place to another there’s a sense of difference, but with trains, you can see how connected we are. Great Rail Journeys (01904 734500; greatrail.com) Offers guided tours by rail worldwide, including a number in Britain utilising heritage trains and routes. Leaning out of doorways, perching on steps and sleeping in the odd linen cupboard, I covered the length and breadth of the country in four months and was drawn into its warm embrace by the whole railway family – from her royal highness the Deccan Queen and the sleek and chic Durontos, to the puffing and panting toy trains and thundering Rajdhanis. I hung from the badly behaved Mumbai commuters, had sweet dreams in the Indian Maharaja’s double bed, and witnessed orthopaedic surgery on the world’s first hospital train. Sitting in a cafe in Milan, I scanned the list of trains we’d already taken. Every time I bent down to write, the sound of mopeds distracted me, as young women with legs like Bambi put-putted past in sandals and summer dresses, revving over the cobbles like something out of a Dior advert.

Customer reviews

after Pol Pot captured Phnom Penh in 1975, the trains played accomplice to his genocidal regime, enabling the evacuation and relocation to the countryside of hundreds of thousands of Cambodians forced into hard labor that led to their starvation and eventual massacre." Probably not a bad thing,’ said Mark, narrowing his eyes. ‘Russians don’t tend to be particularly warm towards, how should I say it, people of your …’ we set off in search of anything ancient [in Ulaanbaatar], finding a couple of scrappy Buddhist monasteries, subdued during Soviet rule. It took us a couple of hours in the National Museum of Mongolian History, looking at armor, costumes and jewelry, to gain any sense of the city's old culture..." Because trains have this microcosm of society on board. You have a train family in your carriage, you’re in such close proximity with strangers. If you don’t get on with people, you’re in for a miserable experience!