Mel and I have now finished our training courses at the VSO training centre in Harborne, Birmingham. We now have 3 weeks to make the final arrangements and put stuff into storage before heading off to St. Pancras for the first leg of our journey. As many of you know, we will be travelling with one of Mel's ex-students who is going to Nepal for a short gap-year placement and, by amazing coincidence, wants to travel overland at the same time as us.
Our route will be entirely by train as far as Chengdu in western China, from where we have to take a short flight to Kathmandu, Nepal. The first leg involves train from LOndon to Moscow, via Brussels and Berlin. We will arrive into Moscow on 23rd February.
After a couple of nights rest in Moscow we will be boarding the non-stop trans-Siberian express to Beijing, China. This is a 6 day journey, stopping briefly in several Russain towns and in Ulaan-Bator, Mongolia (where temperatures will be between -11 and -22oC). Hopefully we won't go too stir crazy walking up and down the train all day!
After a couple of nights in Beijing, we intend getting a train to Chengdu where we will also stay for a couple of nights. From here we have little option but to fly the last leg, as the time taken to cross Tibet and the Himalayas by land was prohibitive. Something to consider for the way back.
We're due to arrive in Nepal on the 9th March where we'll no doubt wander about aimlessly and suffer culture-shock until we begin in-country training on 14th March. We'll be in country to greet the several other VSO volunteers who we have met on our training and who arrive on 13th March.
We expect to be in Kathmandu for between 6 and 8 weeks, mostly having pretty intensive language training, until we set off on the very last leg of the journey to Mahen Drenagar in the very far west of Nepal, sometime in April or May.
Thank you for reading this Blog and we hope that you can enjoy sharing our journey and adventures via this site. We're pretty excited, as you can guess, but we'll try and remember to keep you all updated.
Our route will be entirely by train as far as Chengdu in western China, from where we have to take a short flight to Kathmandu, Nepal. The first leg involves train from LOndon to Moscow, via Brussels and Berlin. We will arrive into Moscow on 23rd February.
After a couple of nights rest in Moscow we will be boarding the non-stop trans-Siberian express to Beijing, China. This is a 6 day journey, stopping briefly in several Russain towns and in Ulaan-Bator, Mongolia (where temperatures will be between -11 and -22oC). Hopefully we won't go too stir crazy walking up and down the train all day!
After a couple of nights in Beijing, we intend getting a train to Chengdu where we will also stay for a couple of nights. From here we have little option but to fly the last leg, as the time taken to cross Tibet and the Himalayas by land was prohibitive. Something to consider for the way back.
We're due to arrive in Nepal on the 9th March where we'll no doubt wander about aimlessly and suffer culture-shock until we begin in-country training on 14th March. We'll be in country to greet the several other VSO volunteers who we have met on our training and who arrive on 13th March.
We expect to be in Kathmandu for between 6 and 8 weeks, mostly having pretty intensive language training, until we set off on the very last leg of the journey to Mahen Drenagar in the very far west of Nepal, sometime in April or May.
Thank you for reading this Blog and we hope that you can enjoy sharing our journey and adventures via this site. We're pretty excited, as you can guess, but we'll try and remember to keep you all updated.
