Here’s a sketch of the route of our upcoming trip. Red is cycling, blue is train, black is airplane, green is boat. Looking at it like this it seems as if we are not going to cycle all that much. Still, I think this is at least 20.000km on the bicycle.
We are not purists in the sense that we feel we HAVE to do everything by bicycle, but still, it would have been nice and more environmentally friendly. We had to make some tough planning decisions about taking trains and flying based on seasons and climate, visa restrictions and the time frame we set for this trip. Because Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan have a limited window of opportunity for cycling due to winter closing down the mountain roads we decided to fly over Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan to start the famous Pamir Highway in Kyrgyzstan in time before the road closes down for winter. The same goes for flying from Thailand to Korea; weather and visum considerations make this the sensible choice. We’ll arrive in Korea and Japan at the start of spring. Lovely!
Choices, choices… undoubtedly we’ll have to make many more choices as we go, but all of them will be interesting. This is just a draft. Suggestions are welcome by the way!
Cool
Blessings,
tailwinds
comfortable sleeping places
Sweet water enough
Appetite and good food
Strong legs
Strong backs
Easy will!
Hi there!
Vicky and I (Tony) did 2 years ago a similar trip. Let’s say similar in that we put our things in our bikes and left from Spain to China. Then, once there, decided that it was too nice to stop there (our first crazy plan was to travel by land from spain to china) so we cycled around and around south east asia, then down malaysia, indonesia and at last we jumped to India. We also where not obsessed about the do “all by bike”, and after having trouble to get the russian visa, decided to get a transit visa (the only they allowed us to get from out of our home countries and in a little of a rush), and get the transiverian train.
The rest is history, and after all this I just wanted to say Hi, and that I will be following both of you 🙂 hehe
Have fun, enjoy a lot.
I would do it again 1000 times 🙂
Hi Tony, thanks for sharing! I love hearing stories like these, it only adds to the building excitement and it’s great to know there is such a lovely community of bike travellers out there. Maybe we’ll meet someday 🙂