Gill and John are off to China in February. This blog has been created to bore the folks back home and to save us a fortune in postcards.
The map above shows our route, we have booked all the trains, boats and planes (actually we don't intend going in boats unless something goes horribly wrong) and all we need now are the visa's. This is not as simple as it sounds, we need four; Russia, Mongolia, Belarus and China. You have to apply for each one in turn as your passport cannot be at two Embassies at once, but we are hopeful that all the paperwork will be completed in the next two weeks.
As you can see from the map above we are travelling the whole way to China by train, we could have flown to Moscow for £50 on Easyjet in a couple of hours but somehow that is cheating so we will go by train via Eurostar (a first for us), stopping for a night in Cologne, a day and a night in Warsaw and an overnight journey through Belarus so five days and £1000 just to say we did the whole journey by train.
During last years holiday we wrote a blog for the first time (Tanzania Blog) which seemed popular so we thought we would do it again however we were not very happy with the reliability of blog.com which also requires you to do all the editing on line. As we will be spending hours sitting on trains without WiFi we have moved to Travelpod instead which allows you to write the blog on an iPad and then upload it when you reach civilisation. Whether this will work in practice remains to be seen, will it get through the Great Firewall of China - watch this space for news! (Note: the blog has since been transfered to our new site but the text etc is exactly as written in 2014)