Final Preparations

Having just finished work, I've now got some time to answer one of the most common questions Gemma & I get asked about our upcoming trip, which is “How did you book that?”, be it about the trains, the ferry or the container ship. We haven’t booked with any one tour operator, so it’s quite a long-winded answer to give - too long for a coffee break at any rate. We’ve tried to be as independent as possible which means that you loose the “safety net” that packages give you. However doing this in the way we’ve chosen means we have the flexibility to pick and choose the route we wanted, and despite the hours spent reading about our options we have certainly made considerable cost savings.

Getting to Paris isn’t too difficult at all, thanks to the Eurostar, and to continue on to Berlin is also very easy. We have booked with the Germain Rail Operator DB Bahn, and were able to reserve our room on the overnight sleeper train “Perseus” online. DB Bahn also booked our onwards tickets to Moscow (another sleeper train), although we had to book this element by phone. Their call centre is helpfully located in Surbiton, an old haunt of mine, and they dealt with our request efficiently, sending the tickets out within 2 days of booking.

One thing to point out in case anyone considers going the same route to Moscow is that when our tickets arrived they did come in several parts. With the aid of a friend’s German speaking mother we think we’ve established that we need to leave the sleeping coach at some stage in Poland to take seats for the remainder of the journey, and then possibly change seats again in Belarus. We’ll see how that works out, although it would have been helpful to have been advised of this when making the reservation.  It’s also worth mentioning that the train goes through Belarus, which means you’ll need to fork out £80 for a transit visa.

Of the more exciting parts of the planning process, working out a route to take through Russia was a highlight. The trans-Siberian is not the name of any one train, and there are several cities or towns you can choose to stop off in. For a while we considered adding an extra stop in Yekaterinburg, but eventually we chose to ride straight through to Irkutsk (6895km) on the famous Rossija train, before continuing on to Vladivostok (a further 4515km) a few days later. We booked our tickets with Real Russia, another European company with offices in London. If you’ve ever thought about going to Russia, this is a company I would recommend (I used them on my previous visit to Moscow & St Petersburg). They not only booked our train tickets, but also our ferry from Vladivostok to Donghae, South Korea, and were able to “invite” us to Russia - a necessary requirement for your visa).

However, their best feature is the extremely useful Interactive Trans-Siberian Journey Planner which you can use to enter which cities you’d like to visit and how long you’d like to spend, whilst showing you the distances and timescale involved. You’ll pay a little more than if you booked with the Russian Railways directly of course, but you’ll find it considerably better value than booking with a tour operator (in our case less than a third of the price of most tours). Also, their staff in the UK have been really helpful, Yuriy in particular for answering a catalogue of questions that I sent him.

The last thing I wanted to mention in this blog is arguably the most unexpected means of travel we have chosen to take, the container ship. Those of a certain age may remember Michael Palin’s TV Documentary “Around the World in 80 Days”, one of my favourite shows. Gemma & I recently re-watched the DVD, at a time when we were considering the problem of how to get from my preferred destination (Russia) to hers (Central America). I wouldn’t go as far as calling it the “Eureka” moment, but there did seem to be a certain Karma in the timing.

A quick google found several booking agents who knew how to make this happen so I fired off a few emails. Judging from most of the replies I got the distinct impression that customer service was not high on the agenda of most of these companies (I’d ask if they had a suitable route - they’d respond telling me to look at the website - I’d look at the website and it says “please contact our customer service team”!). Fortunately however Strand Travel stood out like a shining light, they offered a suitable route on a shipping line that would take us at a fair price. A few further emails (all promptly responded to) and we found ourselves booked in the owners cabin on-board the MV Hanjin Miami, sailing from Busan (formerly Pusan) to Long Beach at the end of September.

We’ll be spending eleven days at sea with no ports of call in-between, and this is one of the parts of the trip I am particularly looking forwards to. I know that some (sane) people would ask how we’ll amuse ourselves for all that time, and the answer remains to be seen. A chance to catch up on some R&R in the seawater pool, maybe the opportunity to clean our clothes and bags, or catch up on some reading (I’m thinking Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, or perhaps Twain’s Following the Equator - both of which have been downloaded to the Kindle in expectation). On the other hand, we’ll be sailing during typhoon season so maybe we’ll have to blank out the whole experience with seasickness tablets!

There are one or two things you need to be aware of if you ever consider travelling on a container ship. The most important thing to be aware of is that cargo is above you in the ships hierarchy, which in practical terms means that you have to prepare for the ship leaving late (or early in some instances), up to 28 days either side according to our terms and conditions. Clearly flexibility is required, so this is not the right way to travel if you have to keep to exact dates.

Also, because we are arriving in the US by ship, we couldn’t use the Visa Waiver program. Fortunately we were granted visas relatively easily at our interview in the US Embassy, and despite the added expense it means that we are not tied into arriving (or leaving) on a specific date. Furthermore, you must get a “fit for travel” document signed by your doctor within 30 days of departure, which means Gemma and I will have to rush to the surgery a few days before we leave London, just another of those little things you have to remember to do before you set off!

However, with little over two weeks to go we seem to be just about set. A quick trip to the doctors later this week (to discuss the catalogue of diseases we could expose ourselves to) aside, the planning and preparation for the trip is pretty much done. We’ve both finished work now, so the remainder of our time will be filled up with packing up the flat ready for renting & packing our bags with all the stocks and supplies we’ve been preparing over the last year, and of course saying farewell to family and friends.

The Blueprint

With just ten weeks to go before we say goodbye to London and begin our trip around the world, the joys of planning and preparing are beginning to kick in. We already have our USA visas, having had to attend an interview at their embassy in Grosvenor Square, and we're now sending away for our Russian visas (to be shortly followed by the Belarus transit visas).

When you reach an important milestone before you leave, you start to realise how much there still is to do - get the flat ready to let, tell the banks that you're likely to be withdrawing currencies that you can't even pronounce, attend doctors appointments for malaria prophylaxis, the list is endless. And you could do without an email from your hostel agent telling you that the hostel you thought you'd booked in LA has apparently disappeared, presumably under the influence of some natural (or alien-based) disaster that Hollywood tells us is frequently inflicted upon the city of Angels.

Nevertheless, I thought perhaps the first blog should contain an outline of our plan. At this stage, the first six weeks are somewhat regimented, a necessity of both visa entry (and exit) requirements, and the need to connect with onward voyages. Initially we will be leaving London on 3rd September; the plan is to spend a few hours in Paris for a long lunch then catch an overnight train to Berlin. We'll spend a couple of nights in Berlin doing to usual touristy things (Checkpoint Charlie etc) and then catch a train to Russia.

There are several options to get to Russia, all helpfully detailed on a fantastic website called The Man in Seat Sixty-One, but having considered going via Poland and the Ukraine, we selected the direct train (which speeds through Poland and Belarus - hence the transit visa) on a cost basis. Unfortunately a few extra days in Europe (even Eastern Europe) can have a serious effect on the bank balance compared with some of the places we are heading to.

Once in Russia, we'll be staying a few nights in Moscow, then catching a train to Irkutsk (hopefully for a visit to Lake Baikal) and then on to Vladivostok. We're looking at about six nights on the Trans-Siberian train so I must remember to charge the Kindle & IPod fully before we set off. Once we reach Vladivostok we're booked on a once a week ferry to Donghae in South Korea, and we then have seven days to get to Busan via Seoul. Hopefully enough time to reach the border with North Korea and risk a cheeky peek to see what they are up to on the other side.

From Busan we're booked on a container ship called MV Hanjin Miami (Details at Marine Traffic), a Korean owned, German operated 300 metre vessel which has a DWT (Dead Weight Tonnage) of 93,000 tonnes, someway bigger than the Titanic. We'll sail across the Northern Pacific Ocean for 11 days (during Typhoon season), arriving in Long Beach, California in early October. We're going to spend up to a month in the Golden State, probably heading up to San Francisco before crossing the border from San Diego into Mexico around November.

From this point onwards we hope to have more flexibility to be able to respond to local advice and conditions, so we've not made any definite plans. We’re thinking about spending some time at a language school on the coast before we continue down through Central America by bus, and we’re thinking about joining a few local volunteer projects whenever and wherever we may find them (any good recommendations would be most welcome). We're particularly looking forward to the Costa Rican National Parks, and I'm hoping I'll be able to persuade Gemma to climb up some ancient ruins and pyramids.

Once we reach Panama we’ll be looking to bypass the Darien Gap by taking a yacht down to Colombia. And then we’ll be back on terra firma, heading down the Pacific coast of South America as far as Chile, before crossing the Andes and ending up in Rio de Janeiro. The ideal way to finish out trip would be another container ship (of which there are apparently several) taking us to Spain to practice our new found language skills, before heading back to London.

This is quite an ambitious plan, and it remains to be seen how far we shall get before our bank manager starts calling us (in floods of tears), but then there doesn’t seem to be much point in not being ambitious when it comes to a trip of this nature. It is our chance to experience new and varied cultures and learn a bit more about the world around us, so why limit ourselves?

Needless to say both Gemma and I are really excited by the thought of getting started. But until then we need to work, save, plan and prepare. Right at this moment it feels like a hard slog, it will all be worth it come September.