It's a far cry from the rarefied atmosphere of Durham City, but computer consultant Michael Pears will spend the nex few months travelling on the Trans-Siberian Express and camping with Mongolian tribesmen as he journeys from Moscow, through Russia, Mongolia and China. This is his first report...

Toothpaste that held up a train

TRAVELLING in 1895, RL Jefferson managed to cross Russia and most of Siberia, enduring the various discomforts associated with the tarantass (an open sledge) as well as the biting cold.

His journey was all the more remarkable in that he had accidentally left his passport and travel tickets at home in London, and managed to make the entire trip with no official document at all, other than his pass card to the reading room of the British Library. This however, was a different era, when a gentleman needed nothing more than his sense of duty to Her Majesty, and a stiff upper lip, to see him through.

Sadly, since then, a great deal of 'progress' has been made, and Mr Jefferson wouldn't even make it across the Channel today without an array of tickets, visas and official invitations.

For example, with the disintregration of the Soviet Union, it's now necessary to have a visa to travel through each of the satelite states that surround Mother Russia, and it was here, at the Belarussian border, that I encountered my first problem.

I have a visa to travel through this country into Russia, but not one to get back out again. Several sets of border guards questioned me very suspiciously. Why was this? Was I a spy? Was I a reporter? I told them that I intended to leave Russia via Finland, but they tut-tutted and shook their heads. Several more sets of guards came to look dubiously at the foreigner (everyone else on the train was Russian) and shake their heads too. Eventually, I managed to persuade them that it really was just a tube of toothpaste and not a consignment of raw opium and to everyone's relief they let our train through.

Moscow itself is a bit of a disappointment - there are now Christian Dior shops all over the place and I seem to have arrived in the middle of a vast Coca-cola promotion, as all over the city brightly-dressed vendors carrying usherette-type trays around their necks approach you to entice you to purchase their exciting product. In short, Moscow really could be just any other European city.

But inside the cathedrals, the women wearing headscarves were queuing up to kiss the icons - although the aura of calm was shattered somewhat when one forgot to switch off her mobile phone.

Gorky Park, with its funfair-style amusments and rides, had a strangely familiar feel about it - with kids eating candy floss, and the smell of the dodgems, it could just be Spanish City. (We even had a brief shower of rain while I was there to complete the illusion).

Of course, there's always St Basil's cathedral. Nothing in the West can prepare you for that (except perhaps EuroDisney) with its domed towers rising above Red Square like so many gaudy ice-cream cones drizzled with monkey blood. But that's about as different as it gets.

The Russian people themselves are very enterprising, and with the collapse of communism, every street corner and subway is bustling with kiosks and stalls selling copies of the latest Britney Spears video and Sophie Ellis Bextor CD.

Fashions, too, have changed. Teenage boys wear baggy skateboard outfits and manage to look just as scruffy as their Western counterparts. While, for every woman, the only thing to be seen in is a pair of skin-tight trousers or jeans. The tighter the better seems to be the rule - although this has had an unfortunate side effect, as Moscow now has more VPL than you could care to imagine.