I’d intended to blog my train journey as I went, but I soon realised that typing on my phone was quite time-consuming. The problem? I wanted to enjoy the journey, I didn’t want to spend the whole time looking at my phone screen instead of looking out of the window!

Luckily I found a good alternative in social media. I could upload short updates and photos on Twitter and Facebook much more easily and quickly than long blog posts. This was very helpful especially when internet access was slow or patchy.

I posted a total of 59 tweets while on the train journey from Edinburgh to Hong Kong. You can read the thread here:

(if the above link doesn’t work the thread is on Twitter here)

I didn’t have internet access in Belarus or Mongolia, and I discovered that most social media was blocked in China. This meant that I had to post updates from those countries slightly later.

Somewhat surprisingly I could find a 3G signal even in the middle of Siberia (near the cities anyway), and railway stations in the Gobi desert in Mongolia advertised wi-fi networks!