Barrister-turned-TV host Clive Anderson is the first of six celebrities to indulge a passion for train travel in a new series of rail explorations. 
From Hong Kong, Anderson sets out on his 2,500-mile epic with influenza, an eye infection and a Chinese phrase book. But as he gradually becomes accustomed to the train's cuisine - chicken's feet a speciality - he discovers a country in the throes of social and political change. The journey ends on the Trans-Siberian Express at Ulan Bator in Mongolia. 

"I feel as if I have been on this train for ever," says Natalia Makarova , the former Kirov prima ballerina, as the Bolshoi Express begins to cross the steppes of Asia. "My mind is filled with buried memories one moment, fresh with new discoveries the next. 
Makarova defected to the west in 1970 and now returns with her American-born teenage son to St Petersburg, the city of her birth and her greatest artistic triumphs. In the third programme of this six-part series in which famous people undertake memorable journeys, they board the luxury train on its two-week trip to the east. 
She is saddened by Russia's wasted past and present-day decadence, while her tragic family history haunts her at 
Volgograd's vast war memorial. But there are happier moments when she dances on the railway track, goes sturgeon fishing on the Volga and wanders among the blue domes and minarets of romantic Samarkand.