On this the 40th anniversary of one of Mankind's Greatest Leaps, I've been reminded of a trip of exploration I once took myself. In 1991 I flew from Hong Kong to Beijing and boarded the Trans-Mongolian Express to Moscow. Except that I didn't really: it was all a fake. It was recently pointed out to me that I must have faked the whole trip as I've never gone back and done it all again. And it's all true - all these years I've been saying that I had more important things to do with my time and money than repeat a trip I had already made - but actually, it was all a complete fraud, as I never made the trip in the first place. It was an elaborate scam. There were about 40,000 people involved in managing all the different facets of the hustle, all of whom I've had to continue paying huge amounts of money for their silence. Just the 120 people alone in Mission Control, err sorry, I mean the "Railway Station", who are the kind of beautific honor-bound individuals, dedicated to the search for Scientific Truth, have cost me a small fortune to remain schtum.
The photographs and video of the trip were all faked in a huge studio in Sai Kung, Hong Kong, at the cost of several million dollars. Here is a picture of me supposedly standing on the platform of the Trans-Mongolian Express:

Obviously it is a fake, as there are no stars in the sky. "But shurely" you might say, "the light from the sun would obscure all stars in daytime" - but everyone knows that Mongolia is so far north, that stars can be seen all day and all night.
Here is a picture of the train itself traveling through the Mongolian heartland:

Obviously it's been completely PhotoShopped, as Mongolia could never actually look like that - although I'm not sure PhotoShop actually existed that long ago. Perhaps it was just a scale model.
And here we see a picture of some of my supposed souvenirs, the "rocks" picked up along the route:

Well of course, these are all fakes as well, bought from a little man in Hollywood Road.
Why did I bother faking this trip you might ask? Well of course there's the obvious political reasons, to get one over on the Commies, and strike a blow for freedom and integrity. And impress girls. Also it has been suggested that the technology back in 1991 simply wasn't advanced enough to get a train all the way from Beijing to Moscow? I''m not quite so convinced by this argument - as I'm fairly sure that trains have been transporting people around the world well before (and after) my supposed trip. Of course there's been a few accidents - but train travel is still probably (nearly) as safe as flying.
No: The real reason I faked it was because I was scared. Scared that I might get a tummy-ache, or get ripped off for a few dollars by some sack-bound peasant somewhere along the route. Much better to suppress my desire to explore and travel, and take the easy (though much more expensive and troublesome) option of faking the whole thing. Of course I'm not going to reveal exactly where the faking started and ended - did I actually fly to Beijing, for example, or just stay hidden away in Hong Kong? Did I get the visas, a furry hat and a big coat? Or not? Sorry, I don't feel like giving everything away.
Ah - the beauty and wonder of true exploration, that has driven man since the earliest days to circle the globe and head out to the stars. Well, some people anyway. Others prefer to come up with feck-witted, arse-brained, non-scientific conspiracy theories and spread them through the interweb, and unfortunately others choose to believe them. Their loss. And the Wonders of the Universe are all mine.
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