Planning and preparing

THE MAIN OPTIONS

We had these four main options to go to China. They were all tempting in different ways. In retrospect and knowing what was about to happen it would have been interesting to ride through Ukraine and Crimea into Georgia.

The reason why we decided to head straight for Istanbul was to quickly ride into spring season and get some sunshine on our faces.

THE CHOSEN ROUTE

Below are maps of the route we plan to cycle. Everything from distances, traveling times and start and arrival dates are rough approximations.

We encourage our old friends to come and visit us along the way and we are looking forward to making new friends as we go.

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Göteborg – Karlskrona
Estimated distance 380 km
Planned as 10 days traveling time and many visits to friends.

COMPLETED 1 March 2013 after 421 km.
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Gdynia – Istanbul
Estimated distance 2300 km.
Planned as 6 weeks of traveling time and arrival in mid April.

COMPLETED on 17 April after 2413 km. We went back to Sweden from Bucharest for 9 days during the Easter holiday which delayed us slightly.

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The original plan was to cycle from Istanbul to Tbilisi in Georgia and then go south through Armenia and into Iran and the continue through Turkmenistan. There will be a presidential election in Iran at the time we intended to pass through Iran and visas will not be issued to independent travel during that period. We therefore had to change our route and cross the Caspian Sea on a ferry from Baku to Aqtau. Reports say that this ferry is very unreliable and we may have to wait for a few weeks until we can board which makes it hard to predict when we can start to cycle across Central Asia.
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Istanbul – Baku
Distance as 2300 km
Start from Istanbul April 26 and plan to arrive Baku in early or mid June.

COMPLETED 17 June 2013 after 2364 km. We were hold up in Tbilisi for a week to let Wej’s knee recover after a fall.

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Aqtau to the border between Kyrgizstan and China
Distance: 2700 km
Travel time is expected to approximately 6 weeks, but visa applications may slow us down.

COMPLETED 11 August 2013 after 2922 km and 29 cycling days. We were hold up in Sary Tash close to the Chinese border for 4 days due to the border being closed for the end of Ramadan celebrations.
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Through China
Distance approximately 6000 km
3 months traveling time.
We hope to be able to start this segment sometime during August or early September and exit China in November or Early December.

COMPLETED on 3 November after 4822 km. We had to go by bus three times. The first time (approx 500 km) was due major mechanical problems. The second time we didn’t feel safe due to a lot of holiday traffic and tunnels so we took the bus about 110 km past the section with long tunnels. Our third bus ride was 250 km between Kunming and Mojiang to allow a friend who flow in from Sweden to Kunming to cycle with us to Luang Prabang.
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Through Laos and Thailand
Distance: approximately 1400 km
3-4 weeks traveling time.
We hope to be able to start this segment in early December and finish around Christmas.

COMPLETED on 1 December. We stopped one week in Joakim´s family in Banglen before cycling the last day to Bangkok.

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Practice rides

We did a couple of practice rides to check out how our gear works in winter climate. This movie is in Thai language.

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