Siberia instantly evokes images of a stark, barren and hostile land - vast wilderness tracts suitable to be the final destination for society's unwanted members, a place befitting the world's most notorious penal colony. Maxim Gorky described it as "a land of chains and ice" and that is how it was for all those hundreds and thousands sentenced to live their lives in the icy wastelands of Siberia.

The tsar's secret police or Stalin's NKVD, both wrote out one way tickets for the same destination - Siberia. Petty criminals, recalcitrant peasants, avant garde visionaries, public enemies or private, political dissidents or simply anyone the system and its rulers decided to get rid of - Siberia is where they went.

Siberia is a vast flat land wrapped around a third of the northern hemisphere, buried deep in the bowels of Mother Russia. Within its vast expanse lies the largest freshwater lake in the world, meandering rivers, grassy steppes and taiga teeming with wildlife, fiery, slumbering volcanos, towering snow clad mountains and areas under permafrost. Ice and snow cover most of Siberia for the better part of the year with temperatures falling below -68 °C at times.

But Siberia has an unforgettable beauty, a presence and an aura that mesmerises the mind and captivates the heart. It has fabulous natural beauty,  indigenous people, wondrous architecture and a sense of space that is unsurpassable.

Visitors come to see the brilliant blue skies, the panoramic views, to travel on the romantic but exhausting Trans-Siberian trains and to see a land that is only now open to travellers and tourists. A visit to Siberia is never simply a trip, it is an experience, an expedition and an odyssey into a mysterious and enigmatic land.