So I’ve been out of the loop. I opted out of life and spent a month traveling the Trans-Siberian railway from St Petersburg-Beijing. No phone, no email, no Facebook. Just more life.

Now back and ensconced in my Tokyo routine and feeling dehumanised by urban life; family, friends and clients have kindly been asking for details of my trip . . . and I’ve discovered that it’s impossible to put a month’s worth of experiences into the perfect sound bite.

From seeing Saint Petersburg’s Mikhailovsky Theatre open its 177th season with a premiere of Swan Lake, to experiencing the chill of the Siberian wind, to sleeping in gers with traditional nomadic Mongolian families, to riding on an ox and cart through the Eurasian Steppes, to climbing the Great Wall of China. Oh and did I mention the four nights on the train from Moscow-Irkutsk? Or the banya experience at Lake Baikal?

Just exactly how is one supposed to put this multitude of experiences into an all-purpose, catchy one-liner?

It can’t be done. Travel changes you on the inside. It’s just that when we’re back on home soil all we do is narrate in monologue fashion what we saw on the outside.

We reel off all the exotic places we saw, list the creature comforts of the divine hotels we stayed in or the leaky tent we roughed it in, describe the strange and curious meals we ate and detail all the good, bad and never-drinking-that-ever-again local alcohol we (too frequently!) consumed. We describe the crazy people we met, the beyond bad pop music we listened – and of course – danced to and bang on and on about how alternatively gorgeous or rubbish the weather was.

We usually don’t recount our feelings of travel – what was stirring inside us when a stirring view caught our breath and moved our heart.

So some advice for the next person that asks me about my trip.

Ask instead the emotions I recollect. Inquire exactly how this journey moved me. Demand to know why this travel experience was a game changer in my life. And then we’ll be having a discussion where I share with you how I finally learnt (and experienced as a Truth) that life is a journey, not a destination.