Well this the first post (kinda). We knuckled down and started planning our adventure on Sat 6th Feb 2010, but only decided on blogging about it a week later.. so you will have to imagine that this was actually written on 6/7 Feb. “What adventure ?”,  “What’s this all about ?”, “Who are you?”, “Are you insane?”……. “I can hear you caring” (thanks House MD)  Well check out About Us and Best Laid Plan pages above to answer some of those questions. If you are new to reading a blog (Mom, Dad etc), look at the Credits page. If the pages I mention don’t work it’s because I haven’t done them yet ! So to the five people who accidentally stumbled onto this page and we hope to our family and friends, it’s….  

On with the Show –  87 Sleeps Go  

A BEEG wall map (socks shown for scale)

First thing – hang a BEEEG map and get some markers (done). Then get lots of great ideas and inspiration (easy). Next find the energy to do some basic planning (boring). V had a large collection of Lonely Planet guide books and a few hundred random web links. I got back from SA last Sunday so we decided that it’s now or never for the boring bits. True adventure I guess is having no plan at all, but we like plans, so we started with some basics; 

• What countries are we going through (more or less) ?
• What are the Visa Requirements ?
• How long will it take ?
• How much will it cost ?
• What gear do we need ?

Two hours on the web later and it turns out we are looking at 20 or so countries. The visa requirements seem simple with some exceptions – Russia, Mongolia and China we’ll get through a UK company called Real Russia, Vietnam we’ll need to send off to the embassy in London, for Laos the information is sketchy and the rest seems you can get at border posts (we hope). Estimated around £1000 each for visas !  (Vicki has promised to add an accurate ‘Budget’ page as a resource). 

We scribbled some estimated durations onto our wall map without too much detail. Pushing back our start date to 5 May will cause some problems (like trekking in Nepal during the monsoon – got to figure that one out), but it looks like we will be travelling until the end of the year or until the funds run out (whichever comes first). 

Then the scary bit, costs! We found a few sites around giving estimations for different countries…. Adding a randomly generated fudge factor we came up with an all inclusive average of £50/person/day for the duration of the trip. We hope to publish accurate figures as we go providing a resource for others. We’ll keep you posted, but an absence of posts means we ran out of cash in Borneo and can’t even afford 5 minutes in an Internet cafe. In this case we suggest you ignore this paragraph. 

We are both serious gear junkies. So the rest of the weekend was spent looking at gear online. Planning never really made it back onto the agenda once we started talking gear. We’ll have more for you on this one (a ‘Gear Page’ soon), but we are looking at 8-10kg packs (around 30-35L). I think we are going to have to change our names from Vicki & Simon to Fast & Light !

I’m sure the posts will get shorter and more interesting as we get into this – thanks for reading anyway !