The Great Mongolian Eclipse Expedition of 1997
or
Stuart & Mervyn's Excellent Adventure
These pages show a few pictorial highlights of my journey across
Europe, Russia, Siberia, Mongolia, and China in March 1997 to see
the total solar eclipse of March 9. The tour was organised by
Explorers
Tours (UK) Ltd, and involved travelling almost 11000 km
in 18 days through 9 countries and 8 time zones on 5 different
trains, all for just 2 minutes of 1 eclipse! But as you'll see,
the trip would have been more than worthwhile, even without an
eclipse in between.
I wish to dedicate this diary to my travelling companions, particularly Mervyn "Don't call me Melvyn" Thomas, Rhona, Liz, Edna, Neville, Gerry, Paul, Richard and Annette, Robin, Gordon, and Phillip (and others whose names I've forgotten - sorry!) for their company and good humour throughout this wonderful journey.
Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions, comments, or experiences of your own to share about the 1997 eclipse. My e-mail address is "sdr", followed by "@aao.gov.au" (sorry, that's a kludge to confuse those Web-crawlers that trawl the WWW for addresses to add to junk-mail lists).
To speed up downloading, I have shrunk the images by a factor of 2, and broken the journey up into sections. If you wish to see the full-size version of any picture, just click on it. The images started out as 35 mm slides, were scanned onto PhotoCD by Imagers of Atlanta GA, touched up and converted to JPEG format by Mervyn using Adobe Photoshop on his Mac, then ftp'd back to me here in Hawaii.
Now, on with the journey!