Home

Late on Monday night (the 20th) we arrived home at Melbourne airport. The Qatar flights were comfortable, even though delays meant that we had a very tight connection at Doha.

So -

• we've travelled halfway across the world by train, logging over 11,200 km on the trains in about 9 days of travel
• we've travelled by plane, train, taxi, trolley-bus, tram, marshrutka (mini-bus), metro, monorail, ferry, car and foot
• we've found Lake Baikal and swum in the Black Sea
• we worked out how to explore the battlefields of the Kursk salient
• we've been to four previously "off-limits" cities - Vladivostok, Yekaterinburg, Sevastopol and Balaclava and even taken photos of Russian military installations that would once have had the secret police on our backs
• we've eaten the local cuisine of Siberia, Georgia, Russia, Crimea and the Ukraine
• we've failed to find Russian wine, but we did find and sample wine from Australia, Chile, France, Italy, South Africa, Crimea, Bulgaria, Turkey and "a melange of European countries"

Now we have to acclimatise to the cold and darkness of a Melbourne winter..........