3 Days to go....

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After weeks and weeks of planning, 10 arm numbing injections, hours of working and plenty of saving, the end is finally in sight. We set off on Monday evening, departing Edinburgh airport at 19:00, arriving at London City an hour later. Our connecting flight to St. Petersburg leaves the following morning at 09:20, so we will more than likely get a cheap hotel for the night rather than benching it at Heathrow.

The flight to Russia takes around 3 hours, and taking into account the time difference, we are due to touch down at around 15:30. We have a hostel booked for arrival, so will make our way to it on the metro, which should be fun seen as the Russian language is difficult to master to put it lightly.

For the first 3 weeks of our journey we have most of it pretty much planned, before we reach Asia and start to have less constrictions and can potter about and do whatever we please. We spend 3 nights in St. Petersburg before taking the overnight sleeper train to Moscow. After 2 nights in the capital we plan to buy tickets for the Trans-Mongolian express and our first port of call is Irkutsk, a town just an hours drive from Lake Baikal (biggest freshwater lake in the world). Shame the train lasts 4 days...still, plenty of time for cards and a few sly bottles of voddy which is the in thing in Russia apparently.

After a couple of nights in Irkutsk, we catch another train to Ulan Baator, the capital city of Mongolia, where hopefully the weather will start picking up as it is reaching lows of up to -25C at night time currently, which might be a tad nippy, even for a Scot.

After a week in Mongolia in the capital city and the outlying National Parks, we make our final journey on the Trans-Mongolian train into China, and our stop, Beijing.

We plan to make our way through some of the Chinese cities, before ending up in Shanghai and catching a train from there to Hong Kong. After Hong Kong, it's a quick flight to Hanoi, capital of Vietnam, following the coast through the country, before moving on to Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Malaysia, then our final stop (for the first part anyway) will be Singapore, greeted by my parents and some decent digs.

Anyways, thats the outline of the trip, I plan to update this blog quite alot with ramblings and photos, as I have been told by everyone who has travelled that the one thing to do is to keep records as it is amazing how much of the details you will forget. So feel free to follow along and hit me with some messages along the way.

3 days to go....can't wait.

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Comments

[Nastya]

Congrats to your journey!!!
That's an amazing thing... Imagine, I've just decided I want to read a travelling blog in order to get inspired and the 1st blog I bump into is yours while you are going to Russia!)) It's cool here in Moscow - a subzero temperature and it's not going to change this week so take some warm clothes. You know, early spring is not Moscow's best time, not the beautiful one at least... What can I advise you to do, is to walk the Boulevard Ring (Бульварное кольцо). It is about 7km long but you can always get off the way and go anywhere else cause it's round the Moscow's centre. A cup of tea or some cookies taken with would only make it even more pleasant) Oh, maybe you've never heard about the Boulevard Ring... Then I must say it is a half-round chain of narrow parks with beautiful benches, street lights, monuments to Russian classics etc. Of course, if you've already planned everything you don't have to follow my advice) I'm eager to read your following posts!!! P.S. I've got some relatives in London and Irkutsk...