Saturday, April 28, 2007

Why these countries?

One common question we receive from our friends/family is "how did you pick the countries you did?" We had a couple of basic ideas, and the rest fell into place:
  • Primary focus on countries/areas neither of us have been to
  • Countries whose economics are "no income for 6 months" friendly
  • No travel on Soviet-Era aircraft (Tupolev, Ilyuhshin, Yakovlev)
  • Exclude Europe, since its relatively easy to make short trips when visiting Marie's family (and its absurdly expensive when compared to the places we ended up choosing)
  • We each have 1 veto

Tuesday, April 24, 2007

J-7, l'impatience se fait sentir...

Dans une semaine, le grand depart... Nous sommes en plein preparatifs. Comme Nick travaille, je me charge des visas. J'ai deja obtenu ceux pour l'Inde, la Russie et la Chine. Demain, je vais essayer d'obtenir celui pour la Mongolie. Nick n'en a pas besoin, car les citoyens americains en sont exempts. Je commence un peu a en avoir marre de passer mes journees a faire la queue aux consulats... Mais, bon, c'est pour la bonne cause.

Aujourd'hui, nous avons egalement reserve notre chambre "d'hotel" pour nos trois premieres nuits a Bangkok dans la New Siam II guesthouse, selon les conseils de Raphaelle et de Jim qui y sont alles il y quelques mois. Apparement, c'est decent et il y a TV5 (je vais pouvoir suivre les resultats des elections du 6 Mai !!)

Nous arrivons a Bangkok le 3 Mai par le vol Thai Airways 791 qui part de JFK a 12pm le 2 Mai et arrive a Bangkok a 16h10 le lendemain (17 heures de vol sans escale.. . hmmm)

Welcome Bienvenue !

Well bonjour and welcome to our travel blog. After months of planning we are going to leave on May 2nd for the first part of our trip, in South East Asia.

During the trip, we will try to give news as often as possible through this blog. Nick will write in English and I will mainly write in French (pour que ma famille / amis francais comprennent).

We hope that you will follow us during our little adventure which should be as follow:
- May 2nd to end of June: South East Asia (Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Malaysia...)
- Three first weeks of July: India and Nepal to visit Nick's family and hopefully Karl (my cousin who works for the Alliance Francaise in Madras).
- End of July - Beginning of August: We are going to take the Trans-Siberian railway, starting in Beijing (China), and making stops in Ulan Bator (Mongolia), Irkurst (Siberia, Russia) and ending in Moscow.
- August - September - October: Central and South America

So far the only tickets we have bought are the Trans-Siberian tickets and a one way ticket from New York to Bangkok on May 2nd.