Virtual travel: the final frontier?

Google's new video map of the Trans-Siberian Railway is a thing of beauty, says Benji Lanyado, but can virtual travel ever replace the real thing?

Yesterday I browsed the Trans-Siberian Railway. Yup, browsed it. I loitered on the platform at Yaroslavsky station before accelerating into identikit Muscovite suburbs, then glided across the Volga, raced through the Lower Urals, sped across the Barguzin Mountains, before pulling up in Vladivostok a few minutes later.

My humble steed, of course, was the wonderful new map-cum-video guide unveiled by Google Russia and Russian railways. The project sews together a series of videos shot from the window of a Trans-Siberian carriage as it spans the 5,752-mile length of the world's most famous long-distance railway.

Various images and bite-sized history lessons pop up along the way, and, from time to time, the window seat footage is complemented by city video tours courtesy of the perky Yelena Abitayeva. Even the soundtrack is considered - with optional Russian radio, balalaika music, Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace read in Russian, or simply the rumbling of the train wheels.

Desktop travelling has become an increasingly all-inclusive experience over the past few years. There was a time when all we had were actual holiday snaps. Then came online albums and video clips, usually aimed at office-bound friends on Facebook.

Then it got a bit weird. Rather than risking the imperfection of a real-life holiday, people began living out their getaways virtually, saving up their Linden dollars for a holiday home on the outer rim of a floating unicorn island on Second Life.

Then we were all at it, escaping grey Tuesday mornings for a 360-degree peek around the Vancouver Winter Olympics venues, or for a wander around stately British landmarks. And then we all started hooking our brains up to wires and transporting into worlds populated by strangely attractive blue people and exploring the floating mountains of Pandora on dragons and... oh, wait.

There's only so far this can go, really. For now, anyway. But it's fun. As far as I'm concerned there's every reason to get deeply excited about video-maps of the outskirts of Irkutsk, and yes, these desktop adventures probably can go some way to sating our ever-itching, increasingly penniless wanderlust.

And there's that gnawing evolutionary thing, too. If seeing distant lands is increasingly unaffordable and/or unsustainable, perhaps these online portals are the best we can hope for. And when things of beauty like the Trans-Siberian map arrive - watch as dawn breaks through columns of steel over the Zeya river - I begin to wonder: could this ever replace the real thing?

Could rather odd little projects like Twinity, which aim to create virtual, navigable versions of cities across the world, be the cut-price holiday fad of the future?



Hmmm. On second thoughts, hopefully not.

Source: Benji Lanyado for guardian.co.uk