The JaYmes Escape

Leaving Berlin on ICE 952 for Koln (Cologne)

And now the end is near
And so I face the final curtain
My friend, I’ll say it clear
I’ll state my case of which I’m certain
I’ve lived a life that’s full
I’ve travelled each and every highway
and more, much more than this
I did it my way

At Koln Cathedral waiting for THALYS 9448 to Brussels

Regrets I’ve had a few
But then again too few to mention
I did what I had to do
And saw it through without exemption
I planned each chartered course
Each careful step along the by-way
And more, much more than this
I did it my way

The Mother makes a surprise appearance at Brussels for the final ride on Eurostar 9157 to London

Yes, there were times
I’m sure you knew
When I bit off more than I could chew
But through it all when there was doubt
I ate it up and spit it out
I faced it all
And I stood tall
And did it my way

A toast of Lithuanian Vodka as the train emerges from the Channel Tunnel

I’ve loved, I’ve laughed, and cried
I’ve had my fill, my share of losing
And now, as tears subside
I find it all so amusing
To think I did all that
And may I say, not in a shy way
“Oh no, oh no, not me
I did it my way”

A welcoming party at London Waterloo…

For what is a man, what has he got?
If not himself then he has naught
To say the things he truly feels
And not the words of one who kneels
The record shows I took the blows
And did it my way

• Entirely by train – Vladivostok, Russia to London ~ 12,400 km / 7,700 miles in 36 Days – September 13th to October 19th 2006



And then there’s this funny-looking bridge…

• By train and boat – From Nanning, China via Hong Kong, Beijing and Tokyo ~ 19,000km, 11,800 miles in 68 days
• By train, boat and bus – From Siem Reap, Cambodia via Bangkok, Chiang Mai and Hanoi ~22,000 km / 14,000 miles in 109 days
• 32 trains, 16 buses, 5 boats and 2 planes – Sydney, Australia to London ~ 30,000 km / 19,000 miles in 132 days

Archives They’re all there, don’t be shy – pick from the random selection that appears at the top right of the page or use the month by month listing. Hover over calendar dates to see post names and click to read.

Photos There are a lot more to come from Vietnam onwards, keep looking out for them…

Thankyou Merci, Danke, Jenki, Aaa-chu, Paldies, ???????/Spasiba, Arigatu, Xei-Xei, Cam Ern, Korp Jai, Korp Kun Krap, Aw Cohn Servanne & Charlie, Vicky, Rob & Mir, Mum, Tak, Phil from Philly, Charles in Vilnius, Gena in Riga, Livius & the crew at Riga Old Town Hostel, Andrei, Natasha & Sergei, Francois & all the crazy people I met in Moscow, Nikolai, Angarsk, Katia, Andrei & Diana, everyone I met in Irkutsk and Listvyanka, Hans and the Mongolian ladies on the Baikal train, Aleunka & Yulia, Jenny in Vladivostok, the Belgian guy & everyone else I met on the M/F Rus, Phil in Tokyo (still there for now), all the folks I met on the Su Zhou Hao to Osaka, Zhan (Jane) in Shanghai, The far east hostel crowd in Beijing, Ly the construction man from Nanning, Arthur the magnificent & the Hanoi crew, the crazy Irish girls in Vientiane, everyone from the slow boat to Luang Prabang, CM Blue House people plus the wet raft tour folks in Chiang Mai, Panner in Sihanoukville, Peter in Phnom Penh, Chen, ‘Rosy’ Simon & all in Siem Reap, Aaron in KL, The CRA crew & Giacomo in Singapore, Dad in Darwin, The Mulgas ‘Karma Chameleon’ tour group plus the Annies crew in Alice Springs, Mac & Rob in Adelaide, Miranda, Miranda, Miranda and all the Pink House People in Sydney…… there was more before Sydney but it starts to get hazy…. special memories of the UDU tour in Tasmania, Dorian, Turo, and the other folks I met in Esperance, Tall Steve & the Coolibah guys plus Mac & his friends in Perth, Hannes, Niels and the Brown Kiwi crew in Auckland, Hugh & Tim plus Chris & Valerie in Wellington, Canada Paul plus Pete & Peter at the farm in Takaka, Rene and Family at the Coachman plus the Tap Room crew in Christchurch…. there are loads more I know, I’m sorry if I missed you out, thank you all….

I can see it in the distance as I walk down Friedrichstrasse; around me are hordes of tourists reading the museum-style displays that line the street. At the junction with Zimmerstrasse, a double row of cobblestones in the road marks where the wall once was, and on the other side is what remains of Checkpoint Charlie, manned by a US soldier with a big flag in front of a pile of sandbags and surrounded by souvenir stands.

Twenty years ago this was the site of the most heavily fortified border in the world; between East and West Berlin. Double walls topped with wire and lined with watchtowers, a patrol road in between, with guards, dogs and Kalashnikovs. This was a border created and patrolled by communist East Germany, the DDR, to contain and control an unhappy population desperate to escape to the bourgeois west. Some say that world war three nearly started right here, when US and Soviet tanks faced off across Checkpoint Charlie after a diplomatic dispute 45 years ago in October 1961.

Tak and I left Warsaw on the very comfortable, crowded, and ultimately rather late EC40, the Polish operated Berlin Warsaw Express, which was supposed to take six hours but ended up taking more than seven. After spending our remaining Zloty on some fine Polish beer and a lovely dinner in the restaurant car, the amiable men in uniform, Polish and German officers working their way down the train together, arrived for what will be my penultimate passport check, as there’s no border control between Germany and Belgium. From the station in the former East it was a short ride to the hostel, also in the former East, so this crossing of Checkpoint Charlie is the real deal.

Leaving the last hints of Lenin behind me, I walk along the former course of the wall to see the Brandenberg Gate and another dramatic scene of 20th century history, the Reichstag, which was reconstructed in the 1990s by architect Sir Norman Forster with a huge glass dome, and is once again the seat of the Bundestag, the German government. The fire that gutted it in 1933 ultimately gave Hitler the pretext he needed to abandon democracy, and some say that the Nazi government intentionally orchestrated the attack with this end in mind; that’s not all that different to some of those modern-day conspiracy theories is it?

“He must have known how long we were stopping”, I observe casually as we watch the man who’d wandered off twenty minutes ago return with a McDonald’s bag. I’m on Polish train D79112 at Suwalki in northern Poland, heading for Warsaw, accompanied by Tak and a guy from Philedalphia who’s rather conveniently called Phil.

The eleven hour journey started on Lithuanian train 193 from Vilnius which carried us, with the accompaniment of loud Lithuanian pop music, to the small town of Sestokai not far from the Polish border. This is where the Russian-built broad gauge railway that’s brought me all the way from Vladivostok meets the European standard gauge railway which crosses the border from Poland. A single island platform bewteen the two lines acts as a transit point for passengers like us, and acres of freight wagons occupy the surrounding sidings.

On board the Polish train we passed through the razor wire fence complete with watchtowers, clearly dating from the days when it marked the border of the USSR. I felt quite superior as my two intercontiental companions received a polite interrogation from the Polish immigration officer about their plans whilst I was left alone with the now familiar ambivalent passport glance and nod.

Twenty minutes down the line we arrived here at Suwalki, where the train is making a seemingly unending stop, and we’re not quite sure if it’s safe to wander off or not. The man we saw, presumably a regular passenger, had clearly wandered down to the large McDonald’s sign we can see towering in the distance to buy his lunch. Poland’s definitely changed rather dramatically since the days of Lech Walesa and food shortages.

Later, we begin to realise that the man clearly knew what he was doing. Despite the almost continual addition of new carriages to the train and passengers to fill them as we get closer to Warsaw, no amount of traversing the ever-lengthening corridors can find us any kind of refreshment vending facility. My dream of a nice cup of tea has to be tempered by Tak’s bottle of Lithuanian vodka and Phil’s crisps. As the train pulls into Warsaw and yet another set of golden arches punctuates the night sky, I resolve to myself that it’s better to be hungry and well-lubricated than to eat there anyway.

The expectant faces are all around me, jostling for position, keenly staring at the doorway ahead. Many are holding flowers; bunches, bouquets and the occasional red rose. People in this part of the world seem to be obsessed with flowers, in Riga old town you can buy them from street vendors 24 hours a day, just in case you meet someone special in a drunken stupur at 4am. Here at Vilnius airport, the stand in the arrivals hall is doing a roaring trade as we await the passengers on flight BA2886 from London. In fact I’m half certain that some of the folks around me are trying to outdo each other by having the biggest most lavish bouquet for whoever it is that’s been away.

Before you ask, the idea of buying flowers for my arrival hasn’t even crossed my mind. I try and engage with local customs when I can, but handing Tak a bunch of flowers is in a similar league to eating cockroaches in Cambodia; sometimes you just have to draw the line, and I’m sure he’d agree. Tak, for those of you that don’t know, is short for Takayesu and the name of my Japanese friend and former neighbour in London. He’s going to be joining me for the ride via Warsaw to Berlin.

I left Riga on half-deserted Latvian train number 357, bound via Vilnius for somewhere in Belarus. My old university friend, Gena, came to see me off at the station at 7.40am. Another perfunctory EU check of my passport at the border an hour later was followed by the green fields and forests of Northern Lithuania. It was here that ballsy Lithuanian resistance fighters hid during their little-known war of attrition against the Soviet government during the 1950s. Five hours down the line and I was back in Vilnius, the capital, where unarmed ordinary people stood in front of Soviet tanks to defend the TV Tower and Parliament building on January 13th 1991, an event that turned out to be a turning point for Baltic independence.

Having seen the monuments at the parliament building 2 years ago, this time I resolved myself to visit the TV tower. It’s a mighty 1970s monstrosity, taller than the Eiffel tower, that comes complete with brightly coloured revolving restaurant on the viewing level and moving memorials down below for the 14 civilians that died here under the tanks that night just 15 years ago. These monuments, like the freedom monument back in Riga, are adorned with piles of fresh flowers laid by ordinary people. The Riga monument dates from independence in 1915, and they say there that the punishment for leaving flowers at it during the communist years was deportation to the Siberian gulags.

As people start to emerge from the flight, and necks crane eagerly with flowers at the ready, I’m reminded how much this place must have changed in fifteen short years. The cobbled streets and beautiful old buildings have never been better looked after; with more renovations currently underway. People can take cheap flights to London where they can earn a small fortune by local standards, and anyone can leave flowers where they want without fear of deportation to a concentration camp. I think I understand why the flower sellers are doing as well as the airlines and the builders.

“Everyone gets a stamp except me”, I sigh, feeling rather left out. It’s about 5.30am local time and I’ve just arrived at the Latvian border. My kupey companions on Latvian Railways train number 1, the? 15 hour Latvijas Ekspresis? (Latvian Express) from Moscow to Riga are Andrei, a Russian truck driver from Moscow, and Sergei and Natasha, two US citizens who seem to speak perfect Russian. Andrei is the only one of us who needs a visa to visit Latvia, despite the fact that he was born in Riga and his parents are buried here. The Americans get? automatic stamps and I, being a citizen of the glorious European Union,? just get a perfunctory glance at my passport. There is something slightly warm and? welcoming about? this though, especially as my passport’s been stamped everywhere I’ve been for the last? 20 months.

“Riga Krasiva (Riga is Beautiful)”, says Andrei, clearly excited to? be visiting? his birthplace and childhood home. He says he doesn’t like Moscow but when I ask him why he lives there he looks like he wants to cry and says, “Russia is my country”. History in this region is recent, harsh and understandably bitter,? but I can’t help feeling sorry for the poor guy. I doubt he was the one? sending Latvians to a slow death in the gulags of Siberia.

Back on the 2nd December 2004 I wrote that “Riga almost seems like coming home now”. The place has changed; things have moved on, the cobbled streets are somehow cleaner, the shop windows shinier and everything on sale much much pricier than it used to be, but this time it? certainly is the most familiar place I’ve been in months, and of course,? this is where it all began.