Nu beginnings

10th August, 2007
'Let's drive around Australia and New Zealand?' Lee had said two years ago. We had been across Europe in our Suzuki van for the school summer holiday and really enjoyed it-Monaco, Nice, Pisa, Rome, Zakynthos, Kithira, Venice, Switzerland, Luxembourg and then home. Bliss.

During this two years the 'Australian' trip has morphed into a 13 country journey overland to Darwin where we plan to purchase a small camper-van and tour Australia then move on and do the same in New Zealand. We are starting in Estonia then catching a train to St. Petersburg. After this we will visit Moscow and catch a train across the Trans-Syberian route across Mongolia and into China. From here we plan to visit Tibet and Nepal, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Laos, Malaysia, some Indonesian islands before flying to Darwin.

This is the diary of that journey.

The planning is advanced now and the weeks are racing by. I have barely had time to recover from my early retirement and I'm doing the rounds of vaccination clinics and visa sites.

It was bad enough to see my photograph for the visas...many of them unfortunately! Distinctly unattractive, unless you were entering a halloween competition!! Something was wrong with the colour balance as I was not wearing white face make-up or bright red lipstick. On the booth I had noticed the word 'Fun'.. This was not,, but time was of the essence, unabashed we stuck them on the relevant documents and sent them off. Pity we were not going to Transylvania.

Tomorrow is the second visit to the clinic for our injections. The first, had resulted in a perplexing moment when the nurse happily stated that unless the inflammation covered more
than two thirds of my upper arm I should not panic! I panicked, but all was okay. No side effects that we were aware of. Let's see what round two brings us...