Andy Home:

Andy Home is 42, recently married and lives in north London. A Cambridge graduate in modern languages he has spent much of his career writing for professionals in the industrial commodity markets. He was a senior manager at an international news agency before taking a year out and setting up his own market analysis company, Metals Insider, in 2003.

He has travelled extensively, hitch-hiking across the United States, crossing Turkey by bus and India by everything from camel to speedboat. Business travel has taken him to the somewhat more prosaic Walsall, Birmingham and Detroit. This was his first journey to Russia.

As part of the Journey of a Lifetime Award, Andy made a thirty-minute documentary on Radio 4 and gave a lecture at the Royal Geographical Society.

He's still working on realising his next dream journey.