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Destination Samarkand

Less than a week to go now; the visa stress hasn't reduced much in the last couple of weeks. On the plus side, Peter & I now have a full set of the visas needed: Russia, Kazakk, Uzbek & Chinese. It's only dad we are now struggling with, and after a(nother) moment of panic at the Uzbek embassy, when they stated he'd need to come back a week later, but managed to talk them into opening later the same day, as it would completely f**k things up for the rest of the holiday if they did insist on it, so they opened at 3pm for him. Despite this, someone else in the queue arriving after dad managed to do a same day turnaround for a visa....seems fairly shambolic all in all.
Still - we now seem to be still on Plan A...nope...plan B...nope....plan C...nope...plan D...errrm...plan E (I think)...currently dad is collecting his passport on Friday; the day before we leave for Beijing.

We also now have most tickets needed; most can easily be sorted from London to Kiev by Deutsche Bahn, the only problem we've run into is the Hungarian Railways, and they cannot be booked internationally, either through MAV (Hungarian Railways), or DB, the only way we have found is thought Eurail, who also demand a five quid down payment for ordering!!! But we have finally sorted all tickets to Beijing now, bar the collecting of tickets from Almaty - from some agents place in Almaty!

We have now also updated our holding page for the various files we have, including the route kml, and also the kmz (which will open in google earth) detailing the stations and timetabling:
TSR timetable

And just as a reminder:
The leaving date is 07/05/2011 at 9:00am:

00
DAYS 

00
HOURS 

00
MINS 

00
SECS

The next train to Beijing please!

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Comments

[ROGER HARDCASTLE]

Hope everything goes to plan !
Hope it goes well. Roger

[WENDY OLOMAN]

TRAVEL
Bon voyage to all of you - have a good time and take care