Part 2: The Road East
The past few months have been little short of wall-to-wall travel planning; some for the big trip for next year, and some for shorter trips this year. There's no time to indulge in the literary greats or to stick my nose in the latest favourite tube novel, it's a roller-coaster ride of Lonely Planets, Rough Guides and travel brochures from here on in, and it feels great.
I've been concentrating largely on finding a workable route East to China. Initially, I was looking to take the Orient Express route to Istanbul, and from there finding a route through the Middle East and Central Asia along the route of the Silk Road. Classic routes indeed, but in practice problematic in several ways: requiring a large number of visas, going through currently troubled countries and using transport which seems irregular or possibly non-existant. I wasn't even sure how much there was to see, so that first route has been scrapped.
Instead I'm looking at a more well-trodden route, that of the London to Beijing overland route via the Trans-Siberian railway. This route has clear advantages from the offset, allowing me to take in Poland and Belarus even before reaching the starting point of the Trans-Sib.
Although the Moscow to Beijing route is becoming increasingly popular and well travelled, it still offers a number of different options. There's the uninterrupted option, stopping long enough just to take in the air of a town while purchasing some provisions from the trackside Babushkas. Alternatively, stop-overs can be worked into an itinerary by the shore of Lake Baikal or in the Mongolian capital of Ulaanbataar for instance. The latter option of stop-overs is more complicated, and will probably require organising through a travel agency, incurring with it more costs. However with a bit of shopping around I'm hoping it may be possible to have both interesting stop-overs at an overall reasonable price.
In the meantime I'm off to Russia, which will hopefully give me some useful first-hand experience of Russian trains, in which I'll be riding for a good few days on the Trans-Sib.
I've been concentrating largely on finding a workable route East to China. Initially, I was looking to take the Orient Express route to Istanbul, and from there finding a route through the Middle East and Central Asia along the route of the Silk Road. Classic routes indeed, but in practice problematic in several ways: requiring a large number of visas, going through currently troubled countries and using transport which seems irregular or possibly non-existant. I wasn't even sure how much there was to see, so that first route has been scrapped.
Instead I'm looking at a more well-trodden route, that of the London to Beijing overland route via the Trans-Siberian railway. This route has clear advantages from the offset, allowing me to take in Poland and Belarus even before reaching the starting point of the Trans-Sib.
Although the Moscow to Beijing route is becoming increasingly popular and well travelled, it still offers a number of different options. There's the uninterrupted option, stopping long enough just to take in the air of a town while purchasing some provisions from the trackside Babushkas. Alternatively, stop-overs can be worked into an itinerary by the shore of Lake Baikal or in the Mongolian capital of Ulaanbataar for instance. The latter option of stop-overs is more complicated, and will probably require organising through a travel agency, incurring with it more costs. However with a bit of shopping around I'm hoping it may be possible to have both interesting stop-overs at an overall reasonable price.
In the meantime I'm off to Russia, which will hopefully give me some useful first-hand experience of Russian trains, in which I'll be riding for a good few days on the Trans-Sib.
posted by Daniel at 4:57 pm
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