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.