I should make a list of all the different forms of transport I’ve taken this year. It’s been an awesome year of public transport really. I haven’t always enjoyed them (sleeper buses in Laos playing the worst music ever!), but just the array of ways of getting from A to B has been fantastic. From the trams in Melbourne, to remoks in Cambodia, and from Jeepneys in the Philipines, to Sampans in Hong Kong.

I especially like travelling by train. I’ve been on some pretty interesting trains this year, the cheapest being the four-hour train journey from Bangkok to the Cambodian border that cost just 88p (US$ 1.30). That was a hot and sweaty bone shaker of a stop-start ride going at speeds that, at times, would see cars passing us on nearby roads.

The opposite of that is the bullet train that I took today from Nagoya to Osaka. For 75 times the price of the Bangkok to Cambodia train, the bullet train covered the 140km (86m) distance in under an hour, and that included a stop in Kyoto!