The move

On Wednesday 17 December we left our flat and moved in at Harriet's parents in Wimbledon.

You can see that Harriet enjoyed driving the big van.

And yes we had quite a lot of things to move: a van full!!!

The route from 10 January

Leg 1 of our trip: we're leaving on 10 January 2009 and going accross Europe to Asia by train. London-Lille-Strasbourg-Vienna-Budapest-Bucharest-Istanbul.

Stoping on the way in Lille for 1 night to see our friends and in Strasbourg for 2 nights to say bye-bye to my family. Overnight train then to Vienna and we will spend 1 night in Budapest. I've heard it's a beautiful city! Then a long 48h trip to Istanbul where we'll spend 2 nights. We're then flying to India from istanbul on the 19th. Sadly, and in order not to get our families super-worried, we decided to fly over Iran and Pakistan. I'm sure they are beautiful countries though with great people, but current political issues don't help...So we should get to Cochin in Kerala on the 20th.

the route

And this is leg 2 of the trip: 12 to 18 months in Asia. All of the overland journey still needs to be defined, we'll see when we get there. But the rough plan is to stay 4-5 months in India and then go to Sri-Lanka where we will spend about 2 months. We have some friends to see there and we need to get some things moving for our charity Lankangels (www.lankangels.org.uk). By August/Sept we should be making our way towards South-East Asia: maybe Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia...who knows....I'd like to cycle it. We'll see how we feel by then and if we can find some decent bikes.
If we can stay long enough (surely it will be hard to spend an extra 2 or 3 months on the beach), we'd like to come back on the Transiberian, leaving Hanoi to reach Beijing and catch the transiberain from there. But to fully apprecaite this amazing journey we would need to wait for the winter to have passed, so maybe April/May 2010. But that all seems a long way away, so let's see nearer the time.