Here is a summary of some of the minor pieces of equipment we carry that are so useful on a daily basis we now couldn’t imagine adventuring without them. At the start of any trip it’s difficult to know exactly what to take when you have limited space and budget but as this list of little gems proves, it’s often the most basic, cheap and unassuming objects which are the most ingenious, utilised and valued. The Red Basket
Pegless Elastic Washing Line
'Baby Legs' Torch
Cargo Net
Sticky Back Velcro
SPOT Locator
Sink
Knife, Fork and Spoon Set
Diesel Stickers
Galileo Pro Maps App
Key Lanyard
Paper Fan
Sunglass Case Multi-holder
Thermometer
Torches
Vegetable Bags
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With a very limited budget, as well as frequently being presented with a wide range of items of varying price and quality, we spent a lot of time deciding where best to splash our cash when purchasing our adventure equipment. These are the purchases we “ummmmed and aaaaahed” over buying at the beginning as, to us, they were expensive. In hindsight, the following we consider to be our top buys, our ‘best investments’. Bee-Bee
Rooftent
Pan Set
Fridge
Tyres
Cooker
Awning
Boxes
Chairs
Solar Panel
NB- these are all honest, independent reviews with no brand attachment or endorsement obligation. However, if you are reading this and represent the companies mentioned, free stuff is always warmly received ;-)
At the start of a long stretch of mind-numbing jobs and stupidly long hours to raise money for our trip I was discussing our plans to an employer when she fired the unexpected question at me “… but what will you do every day?” Such a basic, rational, yet strangely odd question but so difficult to answer. My normally animated adventure chit-chat was silenced and I found myself speechless for the first time when discussing 800 days. So, to clarify “what we do every day” here is a breakdown of our day-to-day 800 days activities; Driving
Exploring
Planning
Washing
Drinking
Eating
Sleeping
communication
Chores
Maintenance
Relaxing
We leave in 80 days and are pleased to launch our new website and new plan. Bigger, bolder, brighter (yet naturally still in Bee-bee) the new 800 days promises to valiantly continue our overland adventure.
Setting off from England on July 21st, we’ll weave our way down through South-Eastern Europe; Belgium, Germany, Austria, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, Kosovo, Albania, Greece, Bulgaria, Turkey and Cyprus (phew!). By early 2015 we should be venturing into the lesser-travelled Caucasus region through Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. Crossing the Caspian Sea by ship we’ll arrive in Kazakhstan and pick up our original route through the ‘Stans and Iran before voyaging into Asia. Let the 80 to 800 days countdown begin… Emma Regular followers of our blog will know that late last year whilst in Mongolia our original ‘round the world’ trip had a huge change of plan when we received news that both my parents had been diagnosed with cancer. In February we ventured out again with a no commitments route through France, Spain, Portugal and down to Morocco; 5 months later and given the situation it’s hard for us to continue much further and rather than spend our hard earned cash pottering around an expensive Europe we have decided to head back to the UK and spend some quality time with my parents. The opportunity will also give us a chance to earn some more adventure funds and really plan the next phase of our trip. Despite adventuring being temporarily on hold again we will continue to update our website and blog.
Andy The eagle-eyed amongst you may have noticed that our last ‘Spot’ GPS location had deviated from our planned route. In actuality we have just arrived back in the UK after motoring home from Mongolia in 15 days (a feat any Mongol Rally team would be proud of). This slight temporary change of plan has come about after receiving news that both my mum and dad have been diagnosed with Cancer. Both Emma and I decided that the best course of action was to return home whilst our visa’s still allowed us to do so easily.
For now adventuring is temporarily on hold whilst I spend some time with my family. We will continue to update the website and blog, whilst the period back in the UK will give us valuable time to give Bee-Bee some seriously needed TLC before we head back out on the road again. Andy Our second monthly update in Gallery Magazine can now be viewed online, this months theme for issue #7 is Miniature. You can view it here and also catch-up on issue #6 if you missed that one too.
Andy ... or face-to-face with an entanglement of red tape for not just one, but three central Asian countries.
We decided to apply for our Russian, Mongolian and Kazakhstan visas from the UK before we left to allow a few clear months of bureaucracy-free motoring. Good plan; more time in the wilds of Siberia. Bad plan; a month behind schedule while our passports go back and forth between central Asian consulates and agents. A visa is essentially an authorization by the government of a country granting you eligibility and permission to travel there, mainly in the form of a stamp in your passport. Visa types vary massively; tourist, business, transit, student, employment, diplomatic (marriage?) they can be single, double or multiple-entry, vary in validity and duration and cost anywhere from nothing to over £200. A Russia visa is the highest-priced in the world, costing 3 times more than the next expensive country. Then there are the ‘support documents’, the additional paperwork that a government requests along with your application form. The best advice is “know before you go”; check out any restrictions on countries you plan to visit here. The first step in obtaining a Russian business visa is the ‘Letter of Invitation’; impossible to get independently as it comes from Moscow and is written in Russian, so you need to pay an agent whose speed in obtaining this depends on how much you pay them. The Russian authorities want to see 3 months bank statements (verified and stamped by your bank) with a minimum balance of £3,000. We had to state that we do not have dangerous mental afflictions (!) and we have no skills in firearms, nuclear explosives or biological substances or have a military background. For Kazakhstan we needed to provide a hotel booking confirmation, despite the fact that we don’t need to stay there or even visit that particular town. Kazakh officials want to see a cover letter explaining why you want to visit and outlining your itinerary. Only Mongolia wanted to check we were insured! Rest assured this is by no means a moan; as British citizens we are fortunate enough to possess a passport which allows us huge freedom to travel to most countries worldwide, globally we rank 5th in facing the least restrictions. Check out the Henley Visa Restrictions Index to see how your country ranks in ‘travel freedom’; the Danes and Swedes are onto a winner but spare a thought for Nepali, Pakistani and Afghan citizens who rank bottom when it comes to visiting other countries. We Brits are incredibly lucky in this regard, something we generally take way too much for granted. After a month’s wait we are relieved to know that all 3 of our visa's have been granted and we are now only 24 hours away from our passport being released from the last consulate. I may be tempting fate saying this, but next day delivery of our passports should see them back in our eager hands Tuesday morning to be quickly packed in the car and heading East before the sun sets. We’re finally off and are sure to encounter much more visa ‘fun’ along the way. For more detailed information about Visas for Russia, Mongolia and Kazakhstan visit our 'Logistics' page. Emma For me, Lush was a natural choice (literally) when it came to all things soap-like. Although we are travelling without access to ‘normal’ bathroom facilities, that is no reason to let personal hygiene slide! However, as most of our time will be spent camping in the wilderness we are conscious of ‘treading lightly’ so don’t want to leave any nasty chemicals, artificial bubbles or plastic bottles in our wake. In addition, bottles of liquid shampoo, soaps and moisturisers are heavy and every extra gram makes the car heavier and less economical.
Our shampoo, conditioner, hand moisturiser, soap and even deodorant are all solid bars; no water as an ingredient means no preservatives and no packaging (minimising waste). Each shampoo bar lasts between 80 and 100 washes and barely weighs anything. Our deodorant does not contain aluminium to block pores (most anti-perspirants do!) using gentler elements to minimise sweating. ‘Dream Cream’ contains Camomile and Calamine to soothe sunburnt or ‘stung’ skin in addition to moisturising. Toothpaste tubes cannot be recycled (taking over 450 years to degrade!); we use solid ‘Toothy Tabs’ which weigh 5 times less and come in a recycled cardboard box. Our seaweed Sea Vegetable soap contains sea salt and antiseptic lavender oil (to banish ‘nasties’) but will not leave horrid chemicals on the ground when we wash ‘al fresco’. We like companies with strong environmental and ethical values; Lush does not test on animals, everything is hand-made with fresh, fairly-traded ingredients (and they don’t even advertise their products). It’s good value too- with most expensive face creams you pay more for the supermodel who tells you how ‘great’ it is than the actual ingredients. Through careful choices like this we can be clean and smell nice for 800 days whilst minimising our impact on the planet we are exploring. Emma Visa processing times continue to keep our itchy feet on British soil; the good news is that we have been granted Kazakhstan and Mongolian Visas and are just waiting on Russia now. For all our planning and painstakingly precise lists there are still two big logistical questions before we hit the road; will it all fit in and will it all work? With bonus time on our hands we set off for 3 days camping on the Isle of Purbeck in Dorset. Designated as an ‘Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty’, this peninsula boasts the highest number of native wild flower species in Britain and is home to all seven of the UK’s reptile species. The weather has been gorgeously sunny throughout England over the past couple of weeks; we chose Burnbake Campsite, a quite woodland spot as the location for our overland overhaul.
Space was pretty much maxed-out as we drove off which has provoked some thought about how we can reduce our equipment to allow a less crammed-in carload. The majority of our possessions are organised into 13 Wolf Boxes which stack together and allow us to store and access our equipment easily and methodically. These have also controlled what we take with us; both Andy and I have limited ourselves to one box each for clothing and one for personal possessions. Throughout our travel trial the boxes were shuffled and re-packed, with some items being relegated as superfluous and others being added to a new list. Our rooftent is now a boudoir of luxury with new duvet and bedding, we have also fitted foam camping mats between the mattress and the fibreglass base for extra insulation when we venture close to the Arctic Circle. We fitted DIY hole-punch peg eyelets to the bottom of our awning walls to fix it securely to the ground and stop the sides flapping about in the wind. Some kitchen Feng-shui presented us with an efficient work area for food preparation; the industrial-lino-covered tailgate has already proved to be an excellent work surface. Our pristine Coleman dual-fuel burner stove was taken out of the box and (following careful reading of instructions- it runs on petrol!) was soon cooking up our first outdoor cuisine. Despite being limited to just 2 boxes our kitchen has pretty much everything; including the kitchen sink (collapsible, of course).We were keen to see how long our ‘house battery’ would last before needing a re-charge; impressively, for the 3 days we were there our fridge ran constantly at 3⁰C, we charged laptop and camera batteries, and had lights underneath the awning and in the rooftent at night (with 25% power remaining when we left!). Our ‘2 second cabin’ lived up to its name when bursting out of the bag (mastering the art of folding it back in took slightly longer). This lightweight, compact 1m x 1m tent is ideal for use as a shower, washroom, toilet or changing tent. The adventure Hammock had its first ‘stringing-up’... following this our productivity noticeably decreased; nothing is more relaxing than swinging gently in the dappled sunshine with a warm breeze and only background bird song. We can’t wait for some of the shine on our new equipment to be replaced with dust and mud but in the meantime it’s reassuring to know that we’re well prepared for the journey ahead. Emma |
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