Day 171: Sorted to Stockholm

More progress today. Kate has bought all of the train tickets to get us from London to Stockholm and has started the wheels in motion to get our Stockholm to St Petersburg ferry tickets. We had a bit of a hiccup when she realised that first, the price had gone up, and second, the trains we wanted weren’t actually available at those new prices – they were even more expensive. However, she found another route that cost almost the same as the original tickets and actually had better timings for us. So now we’re catching the Eurostar to Brussels, then travelling to Cologne, where we’ll overnight. Then it’s Hamburg-Copenhagen-Stockholm, where we’ll also overnight before hopping on the ferry. Kate bought the tickets from a German site, which threw HSBC into a tizzy. After buying the first leg, she discovered that her credit card had been blocked. The good news was that the site accepted PayPal payments, and a few days ago we discovered that we had more than £500 in our PayPal account – the legacy of all of Kate’s obsessive eBaying over the years. 

 

So, progress with the beginning of the trip, but complications with the next section, as we’ve found ourselves caught in a bit of a visa loop. We were planning to get Real Russia to sort out our Chinese visas after they got our Russian visas, but we can’t get a Chinese visa without buying a China-Vietnam train ticket, but we can’t buy the train ticket without a Vietnamese visa, but we can’t get a Vietnamese visa because our passports are in London getting their Russian visas. Luckily, we received some advice yesterday that suggested that we can get the Vietnamese visas put in our Australian passports (ah, the joys of dual nationality), so that’s job number one tomorrow.

The Chinese visa requirements have also forced us to alter our travel plans. We had been hoping to leave China via Kunming, but the train doesn’t quite make it across the border to Vietnam from there. You can catch it to close to the border, get a taxi to the border, walk over and then get a bus onwards towards Hanoi. But that doesn’t count as an exit ticket, so while we could explain everything in a covering letter and hope for the best, there’s no guarantee that we would get our Chinese visas. Instead, we’ll have to leave via Nanning, which effectively cuts off a big chunk of our proposed itinerary. In truth, however, what it does is make our visit to China a bit more leisurely, which is probably a good thing.