UK TO Vladivostok: Driving the Trans-Siberian - experience the ultimate road trip! Ever had the desire to simply jump in the car and keep driving, to wave goodbye to routine and commitment, to drive into the unknown with your arm out of the window hungry for adventure! Well, that is precisely what twin brothers and UK authors, Simon Raven and Chris Raven decided to do whilst stacking boxes of frozen oven chips in a minus 30degreeC freezer. With a squeaky foot pump and an SAS Survival Guide, the brothers fired up their rusty GBP300 Ford Sierra and headed east. Not being petrol heads and having very little knowledge of the internal combustion engine, with luck they hoped to reach Poland and maybe even the Baltic State of Estonia - where lived, according to legend, the most beautiful girls on the planet. After driving for six weeks and clocking up over 11,000 miles, quite literally living in the car, they miraculously arrived in the Far Eastern city of Vladivostok in Siberia on the Sea of Japan. What they had in fact done was to drive the entire length of the amazing new Amur Highway before it was finished, which crosses Russia in a 6,200 mile swath of cracked tarmac and potholes.
Along the way our trusty heroes drink vodka with Chechen criminals, escape highway robbery, trade banana flavoured condoms with Russian cops, meet the eccentric and plain weird at truck stops in darkest Siberia, endure torturous road conditions and have a race to the finish with the Germans. Surviving this journey by the skin of their teeth, the brothers are forced to confront their worst fears in this toe-curling comedy that is both gripping and surreal.
Simon Raven and Chris Raven were born in the United Kingdom. A career in overland adventure travel was launched when they drove across Siberia from the UK to Vladivostok at the dawn of a new millennium. Driving the Trans-Siberian is an account of their journey and is the second book in the ‘Ravens on the Road’ travel trilogy published by Samosir Books. The brothers have since driven full circle around the Black Sea, traversed the Trans-oceanic highway from the Pacific to the Atlantic coast of South America and in 2007 travelled the road to Damascus. In addition to co-writing four travel books, they have documented and photographed multiple off the beaten track destinations across the globe including China’s deep south, tribal India and the Balkan peninsula. Simon and Chris have been noted by Lonely Planet for their talent to portray an “accurate view of what to expect”.