OK, lets get going again on this. We should try out payume again, it had gone bonkers on me but we can try it again.
Stoy has done a spot check on the Sofia pit stop and approves, we need to pick somewhere for Sarajevo yet but there seems to be literally dozens of appropriate options for that. I suspect we are looking at 12 people once we get past Vienna.
I am waiting for BV and MT on facebook to reply to my "put up or shut up" latest mail, they've got till 1st september to respond at which point I'll just prune them if they cant be bothered to talk to me, there's a limit to how much effort I am prepared to put into chasing folks.
Once I've got any remaining ditherers nailed one way or t'other, I vote we should book at least one spare bed and spread that out, depending on what size these dorms are (that may happen anyway, we'll see). It's only Narvik and Venice that wil need paying for this side of new year.
I have to confess to wandering off into GC-PRC-RC territory, or my "not the trans siberian express" project. Open street map is claiming the line from kars in eastern turkey to tblisi is already built, that's not quite true, but by all accounts it will be next year. So 2015 here we come. I'm hoping to cook up something that will go via Vanino, which is way north or Vladivostok and seems to be the easternmost mainland track (russia fyi has a border with north korea, china has no coast east of korea), This is where you get the ferry to Sakalin from anyway.
Then via sakalin, japan, south korea, then a loop around the south of china via kunming and back via kazakhstan, and may be uzbekistan, and do this kars line. i.e out via the trans-sib but back via urumqi/almaty. 4 boats to get to and from japan and around n.korea, and may be another across the caspian if we go for uzbekistan (it would save an extra, stupidly expensive, russian visa) . the only fesible way of doing lhasa, short of going back and forth, is to fly alas, though I would dearly love to get a jeep along the stilwell road, do a bit of India including north of the Bramaputra, then road it to lhasa, but it would add over a week at least and isnt even open anyway.
It will be proper dear obviously. Visas for that lot alone are prob not going to give much change out of £500 (russia £150ish, china 70ish I think, kazakhstan, uzbekistan, azerjaiban all £100ish, so that's a monkey already) I guess that wont be much less than 10% of the trip either.
It would take ages too, but if it can be done inside a month then, for a 30 day trip, it will take some beating. Anyway, once we've nailed these tickets in feb we can waste endless amounts of time analysing all that.
