An Astute Re-route

Having drafted our ‘ideal route’ (roughly W. Europe - Scandinavia - E. Europe - Turkey - Iran - The ‘stans - Russia - Mongolia) we started to look more closely at a time plan. This led us to the realisation that we would be hitting Southern Siberia mid- winter and could expect to face temperatures of -15⁰C to -39⁰C. In a tent.

This presented us with two choices; spending an extended amount of time in Europe (expensive and, let’s face it, less adventurous) OR speeding through almost a third of our planned route in a few months. Cue a world map and some scribbling with red pens and we now have a brand-spanking new route (the black line) which will see us back-track through Russia and travel south through the ‘stans and Iran with the winter behind us. It also gives us more time to explore Croatia, Bosnia  and Montenegro. This is at the sacrifice of our sensible plan to spend an initial 6 weeks to road-test Bee-Bee and our equipment in the U.K. Aaah, she’ll be fine. This also means we have the far easier and cheaper task of shipping the car from Iran to India rather that navigating across the China Sea which was proving to be a mission (note to Russian shipping companies: if you’re company folds, remove your website!)

Emma