Yet more trip planning

I've now got all my necessary vaccination and inoculation cover done. This leaves only getting anti-malarial medication and long term supplies of my regular medication. Both of these will be got much nearer my leaving date. Apart from this task, I have now done all my pre-trip tasks related to health - my travel insurance is in place and I am not aware of anything else to be done. Most of my financial arrangements are in place, so most of my planning that can be done this early is now complete. The remaining things I need to do all need to be done much closer to my start date, so fall into next year. 

Travel Planning

Got to doing odds and ends that will be needed for my trip - getting a Rabies jab; buying bits and pieces of equipment that I need, confirming insurance and so on. Nothing major, but it does give a continued feeling of progress.

Travel Planning

Now starting to put some basic building blocks of detailed plannng in position. I have booked up an appointment with a travel clinic, to sort out my vaccination schedule and anti-malarial medication. Looking at application forms for currency cards and international SIM cards. I am looking to get both a Mastercard and a Visa currency card - the acceptability of these differs depending on where exactly I am going to be. Have printed out the tickets that I have received as e-tickets (flight from Bangkok and hotel in Beijing). Have also got my European Health Card and am booking up various eye, dental and medical checks. I have investigated getting an international driving licence, but this is something that is valid only for a year; is not valid for China; and generally does not seem worth while.

Travel Planning

Now got to the stage of looking at travel insurance and am finding that I am old enough to start encountering substantial price increases because of my age; and that the travel insurance included with my banking arrangements does not cover such an extended trip as I am making. So it's quote hunting, and policy comparison time.

I am also trying to find out if there are any problems for a UK citizen and resident obtaining a Vietnamese visa whilst in China. I am likely to be leaving the UK about four months before entering Vietnam, so may not be able to obtain such a visa before leaving the UK.

I have now put my booking for the Trans-Mongolian railway tickets in a queue, for when the tickets become available. I have also booked my air flight back from Bangkok; and my hotel in Beijing, for my first stay there.

Next on the list is sorting out some of the activities I want to do in Amdo and Kham.

Travel Planning

After consideration of the factors mentioned last time, and a couple of sessions with Google Maps and Google Earth (one initiated by a friend of mine (thanks Paula)); I decided that Mount Kailash really was not a sensible option to pursue. I have looked at other alternatives, closer in to Xining, that do not require special permits; cost considerably less; and can be paid for on a more convenient schedule. This does look like the way to go. All this will be in Qinghai province.

The other thing I have done is to fix an end point for my trip, in order to be able to book my return airflight using my Airmiles. So my trip will end on the 5th September next year.

So now I have got the beginning and end of my proposed trip sort of arranged, or in the process of being booked. All I have to do now is determine what I want to do on the trip.

Travel Planning

The constraints I am currently facing are that to make use of my Airmiles, I need to fix an end date for the overall trip. To do this I need to have a rough idea of what I want to do in the main area of the trip - Northern China - and how I am going to proceed on from there. This will give be the basis for a rough time spent in each part of the journey and hence the window in which to book air tickets. Contacting specialist travel agents has led me to the conclusion that one of the things it has occurred to me to do - a kora round Mt Kailash - is not probable. The combination of cost (about 20,000 yuan); duration (needs a trip of 21 days); the need to have a driver and guide for all the time I am there; and the permits and visas needed (a Chinese Visa, and four special permits - as it is so remote, and within an area the Chinese keep very strict control of) all mean that it is probably a no-go. As a consequence I am looking at what I might do in and around Amdo and the Qinghai Plateau.

Travel planning

I've now received my replacement passport, so can start sorting out tickets and visas. It took the secure delivery service an attempted delivery, a letter, two telephone calls to their office, a second successful delivery (which itself involved two phone calls to the courier) to get the passport into my hands. All because the first driver decided that because the canal basin is not ultra-visible, he could not find it. It is visible, but does not prominently advertise itself.

Finished sorting out my telephone contract and number, and now all I have to do additional to that is the purchase of an international SIM card sometime before I travel.

It has become apparent that the travel situation in northern China, the Tibet Autonomous Region, and the Uygar Autonomous Region is so difficult - in terms of permits, visas, remoteness, terrain, and lack of public travel facilities - that I need to use specialist local travel agents. I am currently contacting various agencies that I have been recommended it order to get a hold of this specialist knowledge.

Travel Planning - associated tasks

Sorted out a new mobile contract today, with a view to making it more readily accessible where ever I go. Also made appointments with my financial advisors for reviews of finance and banking facilities. None of these tasks were strictly necessary for the trip I am trying to arrange, but the trip was the motive for me getting off my chair to actually do something about them.

Also learnt more about the Airmiles devaluation and the process they are going to go through to roll it out - none of which is good news if I am to use Airmiles as a method of paying for what air flights I actually do.

Doesn't feel as if I have achieved much, as the new phone resulted in me spending a lot of time at my computer changing email addresses, links, and information. Still this is one set of tasks that should not need any attention for at least 18 months.

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.