I decided to head south to the snowy peaks of the Caucasus that divide Europe from Asia. But before I could board my train to Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, I had to work out what exactly a bloody 'put and platform' is.
'Don't go to Chechnya!' the UK government website says. For sure you will be kidnapped and killed. Well, it turns out that they don't know what they are talking about.
One year ago I was stranded on a mountain top in Dagestan when one guy saved me. We kept in touch and he invited me to return to his mountain village in Dagestan called Gagatli. Everything was great, except his car.
It's no secret that I have a somewhat over excited reaction every time I see something remotely Soviet, so imagine what I thought when I saw a Soviet barber shop in Makhachkala's old bus station.
People often ask how I get around Russia, well often I hitchhike from town to town. Sometimes it goes well, sometimes it doesn't, and sometimes I discover a weird place I'd rather not be in.
Just over 400 years ago a tribe left their homeland in western Mongolia and made their way to Europe. They settled on the windy steppe lands of southern Russia and continued their way of life. I went in search of them.
With the Russian winter slowly moving in I bought a ticket on the international train heading across Russia's southern border into the country of Azerbaijan and it's surprisingly modern capital of Baku.
The truth is I did not know anything about Azerbaijan before I arrived except that it was rich with oil money and had an incredibly modern capital city called Baku. But I wanted to see beyond that and get to know the country.
Whilst exploring an old Soviet village in Azerbaijan I was stopped by a polite old gentleman who asked for my documents. Who was he? Why did he want them? Who did he work for? Did I do the right thing? Who knows?
A couple of months ago I went into the Belarus Chernobyl radiation zone to visit a man who lived alone there called Kolya and gave him some money I had raised. I was now going back to check up on him.
I had been searching the radiated forests of the Belarus Chernobyl zone for my friend Kolya but with no luck. Then I drove to the nearest village where there was one last. inhabited house. I knocked on the door and waited..
After all of my trips to the Belarus side of the disaster it was finally time to travel to the source of the tragedy itself, Pripyat and the Chernobyl exclusion zone.
