Trans Siberian Railway Journey. Updated Itinerary.

It's been several months since I started planning this trip and since then I've learned a lot about the Trans Siberian Railway and several of the towns and cities that it passes through. As a result, what I thought would be our final itinerary back in February turned out to be the second of many iterations.  Planning this train ride has proven to be much more challenging than I had expected but I think it will be worth all the time and effort that went into putting the overall trip together.

The Land of the Tsars Via the Trans Siberian Railway.

Shamans Rock, Olkhon Island, Lake Baikal
(Photo by amanderson2.  Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.)

This year I finally get to fulfill one of my long time travel dreams - to go across Russia via the Trans-Siberian Railway!  I am so excited that every time I think about this truly epic adventure, I literally burst with anticipation of the moment that I board the train.

The Blossoms Tour. China 2018

Someone took this photo of place known as Apricot Valley.  If you know the name of the photographer, please click on the Send feedback button and let me know their name so I can give them proper credit for capturing this incredible view!

I've been home, from my summer trip to India and Nepal for a little over four months now and I have been sorely delinquent in doing any blogging about that trip. Hopefully, with winter just around the corner, I will find myself cooped up indoors and will productively spend the time in front of the computer recalling that most amazing trip.

India and Nepal. A Happy Return.

Hemis Festival.
(Photo by rajkumar1220. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0) license).

My first trip to India and Nepal was back in 2007.  I had signed up for a 10 day overland tour of Tibet.  The starting point was Kathmandu, Nepal.  In researching flight options to Kathmandu, I came across flights leaving from Delhi.  That got me thinking that I could tack on a few days at the front end of my trip to visit Delhi and of course, Agra.  I also added a couple of days to Kathmandu so I could explore the city both ahead and after the tour.

Chile, Argentina and Uruguay! Itinerary, Planning Resources & Trip Costs.

Perito Moreno Glacier, Argentina
(Photo by Luca Galuzzi.  Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license.)

We're going to South America!  I don't think we had even left Thailand yet when Bro and I talked about where we would go to next.  That was this past February.  Of course, South America came up.  I've only been to one country - Peru.  Bro's never been.  It's a big continent and we bounced around ideas of where we would like to travel to.  We finally settled on Chile and Argentina.

The China Silk Road. Itinerary.

Maijishan Grotto, Tianshui.  (Photo by Shizhao.  Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.)

I  kicked off this year with plans to travel to Korea with my friend George. He was only able to take a short time off of work to go with me.  But there was no way I was going to fly all the way to Korea for less than 2 weeks.  My travel mantra is that for every hour I fly, I have to stay at least a day.   That would mean a minimum of 16 days in Korea and George was not able to do that.  So, I needed to find some other place to go to to make up the time.  Originally, I had thought of going to Hong Kong.  Our trip would coincide with the Annual Mid Autumn aka Moon Festival and there would be no better place to celebrate that than in China.  Hong Kong was a close destination.

The Caucasus. Itinerary and Cost Comparison.

Azerbaijan Landscape.  Photo by Matthew Hadley. Licensed under CC BY 1.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

It's hard to believe that at the same time that I am planning a trip to Myanmar and Thailand, I'm also planning a trip to the Caucusus! 

It's been crazy juggling the load of keeping destinations, travel dates, local guides, and flights all in order but I've gotten good at it having done it for so many other trips now.  Last year, I was handling Turkey and Greece and the five Central Asia countries all at the same time and before we even left for Central Asia, I already had Madagascar in the works!   Hi, my name is Julee and I am a travel addict :-)

Myanmar. Itinerary.

Kalaw, Myanmar.  (Photo from travelmediate)

It has been a couple of months since I reached out to several of my travel partners to see if any of them would be interested in doing a trip to Myanmar. I was lucky that two responded - Bro and my friend, Ayşe.  The three of us traveled through Mexico in 2011 and we had so much fun that I've been looking for a follow up trip ever since.  This will be that trip!  I'm very excited.

Madagascar. Itinerary.

I'm retired so I have all the time in the world to travel so long as I have the financial means. Poor George though. He's still a worker bee and while he does get vacation time, he understandably wants to be able to spend it with his longtime partner as well. So, I am grateful to Joe for allowing me to borrow George for a few days.  This will be by far the shortest duration trip that I've been given the cost and expense but hey, you gotta live when you have the chance!  Besides, it's worth it just so I get to harrass travel with George for a few days.

When we finally agreed to go on this trip, we split up the planning responsibilities.  George would look for the flights - not easy given the constraints that I put on him.  I would handle the itinerary which I think is the more difficult of the two tasks but given that I have the time plus if I might say so myself, I am a whiz at planning trips, it made sense for me to handle this task.

I started by searching on the web for ideas for a 7 day trip to Madagascar.  Most trips I came across were for 10 days or more but rare as they were, I did find itineraries for a week long trip.  It also just so happened that I received the 2015 National Geographic Adventures catalog in the mail.   Look what's on the cover.  It's a trip to Madagascar. The Nat Geo trip is a much longer in duration but I figured that the places were going to would be the highlights so I focused on putting those on our itinerary. Using the ideas I found for the 7 day trips plus ideas from the Nat Geo trip, I put came up with a list of the places that I though we could cover in 6-7 days.   As you can expect, I had to cull out a few places here and there as we just don't have the time.  Maybe one day, we'll go back and see what we didn't get to cover on this trip.

Central Asia. Itinerary.

Our itinerary is fixed by the tour that we're taking. We started with the basic tour offered by Advantour and then added one day to Tashkent and one to Almaty.

Here's how our Central Asian adventure will unfold over 26 days.

Greece & Turkey. Itinerary

Feels like it's been ages since I've posted up anything on this travelogue but aside from a three week visit to California during which time I thought little about this trip, I have been flushing out the details for the trip.  The actual trip dates were finalized months ago when Bro got his leave request approved.

As of today, we have our plane tickets.  Our flight route has us arriving into Athens and departing from Istanbul.  As always, I got Bro's tickets first and then managed to find a flight for me that basically has us both on the same flight from NYC to Athens and on the return, from Istanbul to Amsterdam.

Then, came the day by day itinerary breakdown.  We'll be renting a car and driving ourselves around on a road trip through ancient Greece - Olympia, Delphi and last but not least,  Kastraki/Kalambaka where we will spend our time visiting the famous monasteries at Meteora .  Kalambaka is the name of the larger town - we'll actually be bunking down in the smaller, neighboring village of Kastraki.  I just hope it's not too small a village, at least large enough to have a restaurant would be good so we don't have to go far to find dinner.

I put together the Greece road trip following similar routes offered by tour groups except we'll be book ending our drive with stays in two seaside towns - Nafplio and Kemena Vourla.  If there's any time to go off the beaten path and check out some smaller villages, we'll definitely take the opportunity to do that.

We'll only make it Athens six days into our trip and will be staying at an Airbnb apartment located in the heart of the city.  We'll no longer have the car so we'll make our way around by subway or taxi.

Saying goodbye to Athens, we'll then head to a Greek island.  I've not worked out the details yet because the ferry schedules for when we will be traveling have not yet been issued.  The tentative plan is to fly to Santorini and then go by ferry to Syros, Samos, finally arriving into Kuşadası which will be our entry point into Turkey.  Although the itinerary for this one portion of the trip is still very much up in the air, I went ahead and booked all the hotels.  Fortunately, I can change hotel booking dates/cancel without penalty up until about a week our arrival date.

The Baltics & Helsinki. Itinerary.

Lahemaa National Park, Estonia

It's taken a few iterations but we've finally got the tour route fixed. The next thing to do will be to focus on side activities - you can only sightsee so much! All three countries are very rural so a lot of the activities center around country life. A couple of interesting things that I'm looking into are mushroom picking in Latvia. We'll be right in the middle of the season so that will be perfect. Two other activities in Latvia could be crayfish fishing and visiting a lamprey eel farm. In Estonia, I'm looking at bogshoeing and there should be plenty of opportunities for fishing and horseback riding as well. All three countries have very strong music and dance heritages so I'm trying to see if we can attend an event or two. Still lots to research but getting the base route out of the way is a big worry out of the way!

Israel. Itinerary.

Since I'm going on a tour, the itinerary is pretty much fixed except that I'm adding a few days to Jerusalem to take in Purim celebrations and to have time for a side trip to Jericho. On the way to Jericho, I hope to stop at Wadi Qelt, in the Judean Desert, to see St. George's Monastery. I also hope I get to visit Bethlehem but that will all depend on whether or not the Palestinian Authority will be allowing it at the time I'm there.

Traveling in Israel is definitely more problematic than in any other place I've been to because of the political situation but as long as I stick with a tour, I will be fine. At this point, I'm so excited about finally going to Israel that it's often hard to concentrate on anything else other than preparing for my trip!

Sri Lanka. Itinerary.

Thanks to Chandana, I already have an itinerary to start planning our trip.  He's obviously used to taking a certain class of traveler's around so I had to explain a few things to him about my travel style starting with no factory tours.  He got that down and never mentioned after the first email.  One night stay in a local village.  Yes, he will arrange.  Safari in Yala.  Check.  If possible, side trip to Horton Plains.  Maybe.  At least one night at the beach.  Done.  Stopover in Ratnapura to see the gem mines.  He'll get back to me on that. And most importantly, two nights in Kandy so we can experience the 4th and 5th Randoli.  Thumbs up from Chandana as we confirmed we have hotel and seats!

And as he keeps telling me, things can be changed.  I like the fact that he's so flexible and I will most certainly take full advantage of that!

So, time to get the plane tickets (before prices go up some more) and to hunker down on reading and planning!

Morocco. Itinerary.

Generally speaking, I adjust my travel style according to what makes the most sense given where I'm going. In some places, independent travel is the best whereas in other places, a conducted tour is the wiser option. In most cases, a mix of travel styles works best. For Morocco, the majority of the trip will be independent travel.

To make it a bit easier on us, I will arrange for tour to take us from Fes to Marrakesh as we'll be traveling through the Sahara Desert and the High Atlas Mountains and I want to have someone sweat over the transportation and accommodation details in these remote areas. Planning the itinerary has been pretty easy overall because we're not going to be going to that many places. Instead, we'll be spending more in Fes and Marrakesh - taking a more relaxed approach to the trip than I have done on previous travels.

Mexico Itinerary.

We're set to go!  Itinerary finalized and air plane tickets bought!

My brother and I will be doing the full trip - a combination of several tours cobbled together and independent travel. I like to mix and match things up. We do the tour where it makes sense and whenever possible, we travel on our own.

My friend and former colleague Ayşe ("ai-yee-sha) will be joining us on the Puebla to Chichén-Itzá leg after which we will continue on to Tulum and she will head to Cancun to spend the night before catching the plane back to DC.  It will be her first trip to Mexico and she's very excited about going! 

I still have to finalize the tour arrangements for Ayşe which should be taken care of next week.

Mali. Plan B. The Adventure Begins!

Yesterday, I came to the conclusion that I will not be going to Timbuktu out of concern for my personal safety. So today, I emailed the tour agent (Sinamory Coulibaly with West Africa Travel Tours) with whom I have been working with to plan my week long trip through Mali, to say that I need to completely revamp my itinerary.  A short while later, Sinamory emailed me the following travel plan. My initial reaction was not a positive one as I only recognized the names of a handful of the places.  Where the hell am I going?  Plus, it's a trekking tour - I'll be walking across Dogon country! But, the more I thought about it, the more excited I got cause it's going to really take me "off the beaten path" and I'll really get to see and experience Malian village life. I have to admit that that intrigues me. I still have to work out some details with Sinamory but it looks like this will be Plan B.

Mali & Senegal. Itinerary

I

finally got my approval for the mission to Mali so this trip is really happening!!

I wasted no time getting my flight arrangements in order and finalizing the details of my trip through Mali after my work assignment ends.  I'm hiring a local guide for my trip through Mali. I still have to work out what exactly what I'm going to do when I'm in Dakar - so many things I want to see, so little time :-(

Guatemala. Itinerary.

W ith my brother and Soon on board, I decided to go ahead and firm up the itinerary. We're traveling with GAP, one of my favorite tour companies. The GAP trip does not to Tikal which is a "must-see". Luckily, there are plenty of local tours that go there so it's just a matter of finding the one that works best for us. Here's the tentative itinerary.

Mar 23/24. Depart SF/DC, arrive into Guatemala City, bus/shuttle to Antigua.

Mar 25. Depart Antigua via bus to Flores. (It will be a 12 hour bus ride....ugh)

Mar 26. Tikal/Flores.

Mar 26-27. Overnight bus from Flores back to Antigua.

Mar 27. Antigua.

Mar 28 - 30. Chichicastanango/Lago de Atitlán/Panajachel.

Mar 31 - Apr 5. Antigua.
Apr 5. Depart Guatemala for home.

As I do more planning, I'm finding out there's a lot of activities that we can take part in ranging from visiting coffee and macadamia nut farms to ziplining, paragliding, horseback riding and hiking. The guys are up for anything so I think we're going to have a lot of fun on this trip!!

Kathmandu Valley, Nepal. Itinerary.

Swayambhunath Stupa (Temple), Kathmandu

As with all my trips, planning begins with research and there's no better place to start than the web. In surfing, I came across several travel blogs and websites that had conflicting information about the safety of travelling in Nepal - there were numerous reports of violence by Maoist rebels. Even the US State Department website had a travel advisory posted for Nepal. My heart sank with each bad "report". But I really wanted to go to Nepal so I felt compelled to get an "insider's" view of the security situation before deciding whether or not to cancel out.