Travel dreams: Blog party

This month's international blog event, which I've kindly been invited to participate in, has as its theme dreams and aspirations: we're asked to 'name the thing, person, place you've always wanted to experience but haven't (hmm, person? I could think of a few, but that would be a different kind of post); dream that money is no object; tell the world what you've always wanted to do or wish you could do ...'

It didn't take me too long to figure that since travel and reading are two of my most favourite things in life, and since each one inspires the other, there was plenty to go on. 

Masai Dreaming, by Justin Cartwright has me dreaming already of the Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania ... I'm flying in on a biplane over the Great Rift Valley into the Serengeti plains ...

... for touch-down in a lodge on the edge of the crater with a view worthy of Karen Blixen/Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa ...

After that, Abdulrazak Gurnah's By the Sea might have me hopping onto the Pride of Africa luxury train bound for Dar es Salaam ...

for a side trip to Zanzibar, while I'm in the region, pourquoi pas ...

Then again, I might do exactly as Paul Theroux did in The Great Railway Bazaar ... set out one day from London's Victoria Station 'bent on boarding every eastbound train that chugged into sight' ...

For retro train glamour I couldn't go wrong with the Eastern & Oriental Express, from Chiang Mai, Thailand ... 

... to Singapore (I'm thinking Han Suyin's A Many Splendoured Thing, aren't you?) ...

via the Bridge over the River Kwai (Pierre Boulle), of course ...

Paul Theroux returned - eventually - on the Trans Siberian Express. So if, lets say, I ended up in Vladivostok ... 

I could in fact take the very same train on a 6000 mile journey across Siberia (plenty of time to take in Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich) ...

... since it would take 19 days, covering a third of the planet ... 

... to St Petersburg, just to see what Tolstoy (Anna Karenina), Dostoyevsky (Crime and Punishment) and Pushkin (Eugene Onegin) were on about ...

... after which I might need a shot of vodka and a lie-down.

Did you notice that trains figured prominently in my dream travels? That's because I'm planning an actual trip this Christmas from London to ...

yes, you guessed it ...

... via Paris, Zurich and the Swiss Alps, by train. I'll be taking Graham Greene's The Third Man with me, of course, and hopefully seeing quite a lot of these ...

(Thank you Pinterest for all the pics. I hope some day to have my own ...).