Reach exceeding grasp - travel planning

My initial plans for a trip next year were fairly grandiose - take the train to Beijing, stopping off en-route in Moscow for a few days and in Ulan Baator for a while. Then from Beijing to Qinghai, where I would spend a substantial amount of time visiting the Qinghai plateau, and many of the tourist sites there. Then back through Beijing before dropping down through Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia to Singapore. There I would use the massive amount of Airmiles I have accumulated over decades (enough for a round the world trip) to fly to New Zealand and on to the Americas (Canada, or the USA) where I would spend time, before returning across the Atlantic.

Contact with reality has soon made significant changes to this.

Firstly, Airmiles are only usable for return trips, starting and finishing in the UK. As without them I cannot afford the airfare across the Pacific, the Americas, and the Atlantic; bang goes the latter half of the trip. The best I think I can do is to get a return ticket from somewhere like Singapore, or Hong Kong, or Japan, and not use the outward leg.

Next, the visa situation in China has changed. As a result it looks as if I cannot get a visa for more than thirty days, with a possible extension for another 30 days. It used to be the case that one could get a multi-entry tourist visa which covered 90 days (with possible extension to 180 days). Nowadays, this is only available as a business visa, which is much more expensive, and requires the applicant to prove, by means of a letter from a Chinese company sponsoring the applicant as a bona-fide business trip. So this changes the shape of the middle of my trip.

Clauswitz's quote springs to mind "No plan survives contact with the enemy".

Bureaucracy in action - Travel planning

Submitted my passport application to replace my previous one. An exercise in practicing "Om Mani Padme Hung". There were two main points of aggravation.

Firstly that the exercise was necessary at all. I had lost my wallet containing my passport about five weeks ago. I realised it was missing the following day, and I searched for it in all the places I had been, and then went to Aylesbury police station to report the loss. They took details and suggested that as I had been in Milton Keynes, I report it to Milton Keynes police as well. I phoned them up, to be told they had had the wallet handed in; was available; but had been transferred to the police station in the shopping centre. I drove over to recover it, and found two things - one all the cash had been taken out of it, but not the cards, or passport, or innoculation record. However the police, as they are bound to, had returned the passport to the Passport Office for cancellation. I rang the Passport Office to be told I had to make a full renewal application and there was no possibility of continuing with the old one. The passport had been out of my possession for no more than 19 hours, so it is unlikely that anything bad could have happened to the passport in that time, particularly as it had been in police hands for some time.

The post office I attended to have my application checked and submitted had two counters - the main one, and one labelled "Travel Services" and "Bureau de Change". I had obtained the application form from the latter, so queued up behind somebody trying to change a large volume of $100 dollar bills, and encountering the Post Office's interpretation of anti-forgery regulations. As a consequence dealing with this individual took some considerable time before I could get to the counter. When I did finally get to the counter, I was told that they did not deal with passport applications there, and I needed to queue for the main counter. So I joined the queue which was considerably larger than when I had arrived at the post office. ARRRRGH !!!

When I got to the counter, I was dealt with efficiently and properly, the woman dealing with me being friendly and courteous which mitigated the situation.

Ah well, onwards and upwards.

Travel Planning

Made quite a lot of progress today: a detailed itinerary for the first 13 days; sketching out costs for that period; identifying a critical path task - getting my passport renewed after having had it cancelled earlier this year, due to its loss; coming across information on Tibetan permissions needed; and obtaining a great deal of information from what I regard as THE site for information on railway travel.

Travel Planning

I am currently looking at arranging an extended trip for myself for next year. The planning and preparation for such a trip is extensive and complicated. I am going to keep diary entries of what is involved.

I have started off trying to put together a skeleton itinerary - itself not an easy task. My initial sketch shows that I need visas for 14 different countries; train tickets and a detailed schedule to cover the first month of travel; having to keep track of times expressed in three different timezones (Zulu time; Delta time; and Hotel time - otherwise known as London, Moscow, and Beijing time); and accessing many web resources - visa sites, travel sites, train timetable sites, and software sites.

The software sites are needed because I need computer assistance to put together detailed plans. I have started using Evernote - a generalised notepad that allows collection of miscellaneous notes into a variety of notebooks, along with snippets from the web and other sources. I am also trialling a scheduling application ScheduleiT to assist in putting together a detailed schedule.

So far I have tentatively allocated a start date in February next year; and started to sort out the first two legs of the journey - from Aylesbury to Moscow, and from Moscow to Beijing.