From Haiti to Barbados, there's always a steel band playing "Island in the Sun", plus fire eaters, or similar. The Guanhani's show turned out to be pure Pigalle - leggy showgirls doing cancans, with camp German cabaret overtones. Final proof that St Barts is only geographically in the West Indies. Socially, culturally, racially and emotionally, it's Cte D'Azure, best part.. Riding the Trans-Siberian Railway is rather like going to a baseball game.

Much of the time is spent languishing in idle contemplation, doing nothing but wait for something to happen. That is until the train pulls into a station, maybe in some remote outpost in the endless treescape which is Siberia. Then, in the same way that ending a baseball innings provokes a frenzy of consumables purchasing, so the whole train seems to dismount from the carriages to buy food. Not so much popcorn, ice-cream, burgers, fries and Pepsi, but an indigenous fare of a more wholesome variety: potatoes, fried fish, bread patties, milk and forest fruits The Trans-Siberian Railway is not all trees. Sometimes things happen: maybe the train crosses a river, or speeds through an isolated village. But on the whole your lot is trees, and there are plenty of them. So what do you do for six days on a train between Vladivostock and Moscow? To begin with options seem endless.

There are the initial joys of train travel: the possibility of an unexpected liaison, the exploration of exotic locations, the mental stimulation from unusual sights, even staring out of the window watching the vast taiga go by has an element of romance. However, after a couple of days, stagnant reality sharpens the soft-focus haze and Trans-Siberian lassitude sweeps through the train. Then, as Peter Fleming recalls in Travels in Tartary, "You sit down and read and read and read. There are no distractions, no interruptions, no temptations to get up and do something else; there is nothing else to do. You read like you've never read before."By the end of the second day a strange thing happens. Your body and your watch tell you that it is time for bed and yet outside the light refuses to give way to night.

The train is travelling west and so gains an hour whenever it crosses one of the seven time zones between Vladivostok and Moscow. With the train maintaining Moscow time, the passengers experiencing local time and your body still working in Vladivostok time you begin to feel a disturbing loss of context as time becomes distorted in the emptiness which is Siberia.You are still time-independent when you wake the next morning. It is hot and you begin to feel the claustrophobia of three days on a train with nowhere to go. With such continued close proximity to personal and cultural strangers you are running out of behavioural tolerance and have to spend the morning staring out of the window watching the taiga, steering clear of people so as not to shout at them.