Packing up her rucksack – and her fiancé, 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.

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. The irony being that I read a good chunk of this which covered the amazing efficiency of the Japanese rail system, whilst stuck on a replacement bus service for a couple of hours! While North Korea spins stories, the Western media is just as guilty of indulging its own agenda, painting North Koreans as one-dimensional robots serving their great leader. 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. I rated this book 4 stars because it captures some of the downsides to overtourism that I have come to loathe.She took out time to reach out to the surviving family members of The Hiroshima and Nagasaki blasts and has listed in detail about the Japanese technology and traditions including the one with the Geisha. 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. 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. I too found the author to be quite judgemental about how people travel (and it is because if this, that I didn’t warm to the author). A wonderful account of the diversity of life and the inhumanity that is part and parcel of our world told with such grace, courage and humour.

Then it’s homeward bound through northwest China, Kazakhstan and Russia, before heading through Poland and Germany to Italy, where they catch the the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express, travelling in well-earned luxury to London. The author is a journalist and her fiancé at the time, now husband, jacked in his job to accompany her. Monisha Rajesh’s second book is a tremendous global adventure, filled with memorable characters, locations and stories.I was especially bothered by this on the Amtrak chapters, because she mentions more than once that only stoners and other degenerates ride Amtrak.

In a particularly fascinating chapter, Rajesh and Jem follow the route of the Death Railway through Thailand (it originally continued into Myanmar but that section no longer exists). 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. Unexpected acts of kindness and generosity of spirit create a unique sense of community, “like we are a train family”, as one traveller tells her in Thailand. After flying to Vancouver they head east to Toronto, travelling 2,775 miles on The Canadian, “the most efficient way to absorb the vastness of the world’s second-largest country in one sitting”.What frustrated me the most is that she thought she was going to be killed in her hotel in Canada because she’s of Indian heritage and instead it was the bang of the AC.