Some chapters read as though the author forgot to make any notes and so some countries fly by in a couple of sentences if at all. I found it fascinating but I was disappointed with the journey on the Trans Siberian train which I would love to do but now I'm not too sure, as the author didn't sell it to me. 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. 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.

Perhaps it was a simple misunderstanding, but Rajesh had failed to realise beforehand that Eurail passes only really save you money if you make a plan and stick to it. If there was one flaw though it is missing a map of her journeys and it would have been nice to have a list of the trains that she travelled on too. This was a book that took me to many amazing places around the world and helped to (briefly) satisfy my constant desire to travel. She also glosses over long stretches of the trip she did take, and it's unclear if she needed more space or just didn't talk to anyone interesting along the way. 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.However, around much of the journey – certainly in most of Asia, which is by far the majority of their route – they experience their skin colour as a small advantage. Her first book Around India in 80 Trains (2012) was named one of the Independent's best books on India.

Propped up with pillows, holding a morning cup of tea, I could lean against the window and watch as villages, towns, cities, states and countries swept past, safe in the knowledge that I was going places, while also going nowhere.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. I started looking up her references for a musical background to my reading and also some of the places that struck my fancy. In some of the countries, she goes into a lot of detail, highlighting the political situation in Tibet or expanding on newsworthy stories to add depth to the narrative. I would have preferred way more variety but we had huge chunks of book about China especially, Japan, Vietnam, Thailand, Mongolia, Tibet.

Though at times Rajesh is very pessimistic and critical of the world, she has a balanced amount of beautiful storytelling and representation of people's opinions. The temperature was pushing forty degrees…Few exercises were as excruciating as sitting in silence, watching a rejected ice cream melting.When Monisha Rajesh announced plans to circumnavigate the globe in 80 train journeys, she was met with wide-eyed disbelief. 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. Packing up her rucksack - and her fiance, Jem - Monisha Rajesh embarks on an unforgettable adventure that takes her from London's St Pancras station to the vast expanses of Russia and Mongolia, North Korea, Canada, Kazakhstan, and beyond. It takes a while for things to get going in this book, and at one level, I'm glad it doesn't have some of the frenzy of the first book.

There is a little bit of history thrown in at certain places like Japan and Thailand which really do add to the book. It must also be said that for a book whose title includes “around the world”, Rajesh does skip over quite a lot of the world. Monisha and her fiance set off from London and cover Moscow, Asian countries, America, Canada, Kazakhstan and many others. While she doesn't go into much detail about this aspect, I would read the book just for her insights and anecdotes about this time.Though it took me a while to get into, I picked the book back up this week and couldn't put it down until I finished. Hotjar sets this cookie to know whether a user is included in the data sampling defined by the site's daily session limit. I understand this gets into a lot of philosophical sticky wickets about privilege and what it really means to travel and experience other cultures, etc. 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.