Day 185: Filling in

Yesterday, work finally started on repairing the water damage. The lovely Dominic, who has done a few jobs for us in the past, and his offsider, Ryan, have been filling and sanding and painting up a storm and the house is already looking significantly improved. We also chose a removal company yesterday, and we’re expecting our boxes to arrive tomorrow, so I’ll soon be able to begin the packing process.

In the meantime, Kate has been busy on eBay – selling all of our furniture out from underneath us. Our bed has been sold, as have the girls’ bunks and shelving. In preparation for Dominic’s tidying up of the cellar, we moved the sofa and armchair out – a rather fraught process that required the removal of the cellar stairs banister and one of the kitchen doors, not to mention the solving of a most vexing geometry problem involving the rotation of non-uniform three-dimensional shapes. My poor old cellar, once the womb-like world to which I could escape when life all got a bit too much (ie, nightly), is now looking decidedly forlorn. Indeed, there’s now so little wine down there that today I was reduced to buying a bottle from Sainsbury’s.

The two clouds still sitting on the horizon are our Chinese visas and our mortgage. We spent pretty much the whole of Friday fighting with the visas. We had hoped to put them together ourselves (in order to save quite a bit of money), so we began the day filling in the requisite online forms. This was a particularly tedious process as each application required the inputting of all of our accommodation bookings for our time in China – date, region and full address for nine different hotels on four separate applications. We then had to print and sign the forms, which was when the printer decided to run out of ink, forcing Kate to drive up to Tesco for a new cartridge. We then discovered that the processing time was such that we couldn’t guarantee that our passports would be back in time. There’s an express option, but you need to deliver everything in person, and the next available appointment wasn’t until the 10th of April, three days before we were due to leave. So, we had to go back to our Russian travel agent, who should be able to turn things around quickly enough, assuming everything goes according to plan. Of course, this meant filling in their online forms, which meant the inputting of all of that accommodation data again. We were then supposed to receive pdfs of the filled in forms to sign, but they kept coming up on screen with dots where the characters should be, so… no, it’s too tedious even to try to explain the other steps in the process – suffice to say, they ended up in the post by the end of the day and given that the Chinese embassy asked for the girls’ birth certificates his morning in order to verify that Kate was their mother we at least know that everything is under way.

The mortgage situation is a bit more worrying. If we want to rent the house out (and obviously we do), we need to change to a buy-to-let mortgage, but as neither of us has a job, there’s apparently only a 50-50 chance they’ll give us one. We have an appointment to talk to an advisor tomorrow…

Day 179: All decked out

The weather was lovely over the weekend, so I dusted off the barbecue and cooked up some yakitori, and dragged the outdoor chairs out of the shed so we could eat it on the deck.

 

Over the past few days, I’ve been working upstairs booking our Chinese accommodation while Kate’s been downstairs on the laptop booking the European and Russian accommodation. Progress is slow, but we’re starting to fill in the gaps – Cologne is sorted, as are Beijing, Shanghai, Pingyao, Guilin and Nanning.

This morning, the postman delivered two registered packages – one containing our Australian passports, complete with Vietnamese visas, and another containing all of our Russian train tickets. We’ve also heard that our Russian visas have come through, so now we just have to sort out our Chinese visas, which we’ve decided to ourselves as it saves us about £30 per passport. The great news on the train tickets is that they cost significantly less than expected - about £500 less!

The other good news is that the painter/decorator is coming on Monday to start work on repairing the water damage, which means we can get started on arranging the new carpets. And with luck we should have chosen a freight company by tomorrow. Friday we're off to get some more jabs (MMR for Kate and I) and to pick up our prescriptions for our malaria tablets.

Day 172: Visa vis

Another day of ticket buying and visa applying. We now have a coach ticket to London and a ticket from Ulaanbaatar to Beijing. We also have travel insurance and we’ve posted off our Vietnamese visa applications. Apparently we’ve also bought tickets for another leg or two of the trans-Siberian – they’re only just going on sale now. So, all going well, we’ll be leaving Winchester at 5.20am on 13 April, arriving in St Petersburg on 16 April, arriving in Ulaanbaatar on 6 May, arriving in Beijing on 18 May and arriving in Hanoi on 14 June.

And it’s looking an awful lot like our painters and decorators will be coming in towards the end of next week to start work on repairing the water damage. No real progress yet on getting a tenant in, but we have another viewing tomorrow.

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.

Day 170: To London, to London...

Today we caught the coach up to London so that we could be fingerprinted for our Russian visas. In order to guarantee that we would be able to get everything done in time, we booked an early coach up and a late coach back, which meant that we had quite a lot of time to kill in London, so we decided to walk from the coach station to the visa office and back. The (long) walk took us via a whole array of iconic London locations, including Buckingham Palace and the Mall, Trafalgar Square, St Paul’s Cathedral, Chinatown, Charing Cross Road, Fleet Street, the Strand and Pall Mall. We even had time to duck into the British Museum on the way there and the National Gallery and Berry Bros and Rudd (my favourite wine merchant) on the way back.

 

When we finally reached the visa office we were amused to discover that it’s located virtually next door to the flat that was once occupied by my Sydney school friend Philip – a flat that for a long time acted as my pre- and post-clubbing hang out (many’s the mid-afternoon I woke up on Phil’s sofa bed after an all-nighter at Fabric, which is conveniently located about ten minute’s walk away). After we got there, we had to wait a while for the courier to arrive with our passports and applications, which had been organised by Real Russia, the travel agency that has sorted out our Russian train tickets. The actual taking of the fingerprints was then dealt with quickly and efficiently and, hopefully, in a week’s time we’ll have our visas. 

In praise of Kate

 

It being Mother’s Day here in the UK, I thought it was an opportune moment to sing the praises of the wonderful mother of my children. Those of you who know Kate won’t be surprised to hear that it’s she who has both driven our trip forward (often literally) and held it together in difficult times.

She did all of the driving in Europe while I looked after Sally and the girls (with varying levels of success). She’s a very cautious and skilled driver and the fact that she managed to get us all the way from Winchester to Greece and back without getting a ticket of any sort or, indeed, damaging the car in any way is testament to her abilities – and we drove on some pretty hairy roads and in some truly atrocious conditions. In her role as our personal travel agent, she spent hours and hours on the computer tracking down a series of amazing and cheap places for us to stay. And she was a calming presence whenever I lost it with the girls, which was far too frequently.

Back at home, she has found and called in a steady stream of contractors to sort out the damage to the house while organising the next, very complicated, leg of the journey. Her keen eye for trouble has helped us to navigate around all manner of potential pitfalls and to jump through an assortment of bureaucratic hoops. More often than not you’ll find her on the laptop, tirelessly researching yet another obscure element of the trip.

To say that we wouldn’t be doing this trip without her doesn’t even come close to covering it and I shall be forever indebted to her for making it all happen – and for generally making my life that much happier and more fun than it would otherwise be.

Day 169: Tickets to ride

Things are starting to happen... We’ve bought train tickets to cover us from St Petersburg to Ulaanbaatar and applied for our Russian visas (tomorrow we’re catching the coach up to London so that we can visit the Russian Embassy and get fingerprinted). Within the next few days we should have bought the train tickets to get us from London to Stockholm, the ferry ticket from Stockholm to St Petersburg and the train ticket from Ulaanbaatar, and applied for our Chinese visas. 

So, we’re well and truly committed now. The only problem is that there are a lot of Kafkaesque chicken-and-egg scenarios in play. You don’t want to book anything in case you don’t get the necessary visa, but you can’t get the visa until you’ve booked everything. For the Russian visa, we needed to prove that we had bought all of our train tickets and booked hotels. But you can’t book the ferry to St Petersburg unless you have your Russian visa. For the Chinese visas, we have to be able to prove that we’ve bought train tickets into and out of the country and booked our accommodation for our entire stay. So, today, we’ve been trying to plan out our stay, so at the very least we know how long we want to stay in China.

The one ray of light is that I’ve managed to secure a commission to do a story in Mongolia – so for six days at least, we’ll be hosted and ferried around, which is a huge relief.

Day 161: Moor or less

The weather was so gorgeous today that we just had to get out and go for a walk, so this afternoon we headed down the hill to one of my favourite parts of Winchester: Winnall Moors. The Wildlife Trust has done an amazing job of rehabilitating the reserve, putting in boardwalks, benches and bridges, and clearing away the brambles and nettles. It’s just a shame that they think it necessary to place faux-poetic messages along the boardwalks and to erect some rather hideous wooden sculptures at various spots around the reserve.

 

Day 160: Sign of the times

I noticed some movement outside the house this morning and went out to discover that we a ‘To let’ sign had been attached to our downpipe. I guess it was timed to coincide with the arrival of our first viewing, which is due to take place this afternoon, followed by a second tomorrow. It would be nice to have something locked in now, but as we won’t be leaving for another month or so, we’re not getting too worked up about it just yet. As you can see from the pic below, we've gone with a letting agent that has let a number of properties in the street - including the house next door (twice). Word has it that the letting market is pretty buoyant at the moment, so we're pretty confident of getting someone in.

Day 159: Progress at last

The first stage of our building works was completed today. The roofer who replaced the flat roof on our living room extension came around and replaced the flat roof on the bedroom extension. The weather was gorgeous - temperatures well into double figures - and they got the whole job done today. And it looks lovely. 

We also came very close to booking our first train tickets, but then Kate wanted to take the girls up to the library for their weekly maths activities and we were slightly nervous about whether we’re ready to commit, so we chickened out. However, with luck, we’ll be booking them on the weekend and sending our Russian and Chinese visa applications off on Monday or Tuesday, with an early-April departure date.

Day 157: Jabbed!

We all went to the travel clinic today to get our vaccinations under way. The medical practice with which we’re registered has started up its own little clinic, which is fantastic news for us as it means that we can get the common jabs for free. We all got typhoid, the girls got the combined Hepatitis A and B, Kate and I both got tetanus, polio and diphtheria boosters and poor old Kate also had to have a Hep A booster. The girls were really good - no fuss, no bother, no tears, no complaints. 

We’re now agonising over whether to get the jabs for Japanese encephalitis and rabies. Both diseases are certainly present in many of the countries we’re going to be visiting, but the risk of getting them is pretty low. And the cost is eye-watering: £85 per dose for Japanese encephalitis, and you need two injections, which would add up to £680 for the four of us. We also have to sort out our malaria prophylaxis, which isn’t going to be cheap either, given the length of time that we’re planning to spend in malarial areas.

An update to bring you up to date

We’ve now been back in Winchester for a bit more than three weeks. During that time we’ve had a near-constant stream of contractors traipsing through the house offering their opinions on what needs to be done to sort out the water damage. The general consensus seems to be that it’s all relatively superficial – apart from the carpet, which will need to be replaced. We’ve now booked a few of them in, so we should start to see some progress soon. 

Things have been complicated by the discovery of another water-related problem. I was up on the roof the other day seeing if I could do anything about the gutter on the flat roof, which has been overflowing when we get heavy rain. I couldn’t - it’s almost certainly roots getting into the wastewater pipe (which will also need to be sorted out) - but when I turned to go back into the house, I noticed that some of the tiles on the side of the little first-floor extension had come off. On closer inspection, I discovered that the beam at the top of the extension had almost completely rotted through - it looks as though the gutter above has broken, so water was flowing down and into the flat roof. So we’ve booked a roofer in to get that fixed as well.

With the house repairs now starting to get under way, we’re turning our attention to the Winchester to Beijing leg of the journey. We’re close to choosing where we’ll stop along the way and Kate will hopefully make contact today with the travel agency that will be helping us to get the tickets and Russian visas. We managed to get Sarah’ passport renewed in record time - we were expecting it to take three weeks but it was done and dusted in about three days. We’re also trying to put together basic itineraries for the various countries we’re hoping to visit.

We’ve had a real estate agent in to talk about renting the house during the next leg of the journey. He’s keen to market it right away, leaving the leaving date open for now. Kate has also been putting furniture on eBay, and pretty much all of it has sold straight away, some for way more than we could ever have hoped. And we managed to pick up a little under-counter freezer on Freecycle - the seal on the big chest freezer in the cellar has gone so we really needed something to replace it.

Other than that, we’ve mostly just been hanging out at home. We’ve had a few friends around for lunch and the girls have had a few play dates and sleepovers. During this more settled period, we’ve started up the School of Mum and Dad again in a more structured form - the girls are spending most of the morning at ‘school’ and then taking turns to help me cook lunch (home economics lessons), which is usually a soup of the day.