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!