Updated 21st February 2017

Our route so far….

Planned Route

route-map-1000

 

Update 20th October 2016: Sadly, we’ve given up hope of travelling through Iran. As UK citizens we can only get a visa if we travel as part of a tour group which we do not want to do. We had read about tour operators that will book very short (i.e. non-existent!) tours but none of our enquiries met with any success. Add to that our lack of carnet de passage, which would mean we’d be relying on a dodgy temporary import permit, and things just seemed too complex to sort out on the move. Instead we will travel north of the Caspian Sea through Russia, Georgia and Armenia before rejoining our planned route in Turkey.

 

At the time of writing our route is steadily transforming from a vague idea of where we might like to travel into something a little more concrete.

As we’ve steadily been accumulating information about visas, temporary import permits for the car and border crossings, the intended route is slowly coming into focus. The country list currently looks something like this: Japan -> Russia -> Mongolia -> Russia -> Kazakhstan -> Kyrgyzstan -> Tajikistan -> Turkmenistan -> Iran -> Turkey -> Greece…. and then the plan gets a bit vague from there!

Compared to a lot of traveller’s tales we’ve been reading our route seems slightly unique in that not many Westerners seem to have travelled from Japan to Europe in a Japanese vehicle. Plenty of folk seem to have done it the other way ’round, and that information is proving vital for our planning.

Our current research is flagging a few potential tricky spots:

  • Our car is Japanese – being far-from-fluent Japanese speakers, working out the exact procedures to take the car out of Japan, drive it through 10 countries, then import it when we get to the UK is proving interesting.
  • Russian visa – this can be slow to arrange. Just to be difficult, we’re aiming for a multiple entry visa that includes the island of Sakhalin.
  • Turkmenistan visa – again, can apparently be difficult and slow to arrange
  • Iran – As you’d expect, travel through Iran is not straightforward! Problem 1, being UK citizens, is that (as of November ’15) the official line is that we can only drive through the country as part of a guided tour. We’re both desperately hoping that either this restriction is relaxed by the time we leave, or actually turns out not to be enforced. Problem 2 is the visa, which is only valid for 3 months from time of issue. This means we will have to get our visas en-route adding to the general complication of being a Brit after an Iranian visa. The third and final problem is that of getting the car in and out of the country – currently, our research suggests that the only country that might require a Carnet de Passage is Iran. I say might as there seems to be some anecdotal information on the internet that suggests that if you’re lucky then temporary import of the vehicle can be arranged at the border.

As we start to read more and more, a few things are starting to float to top of the pile as potential highlights:

  • The Pamir Highway – I’m not quite sure why, but the more and more I read about this road the more excited I get; it really does look incredible. We’ll most likely be driving the Pamir in early November, which is adding a extra dose of apprehension to the proceedings due to the high likelihood of snow and low temperatures.
  • Iran – A country that not too many people get to visit and a country that, by all accounts, sounds both friendly and fascinating. As mentioned, the plan to drive through Iran easily presents the most bureaucratic challenges and unknowns but we’re hoping that it will all be worth it.
  • Arriving in Greece – about 10 years ago, Clare’s parents built a small cottage in southern Greece, which we’ve visited most years ever since. As part of our long way home, we intend to stop off here for a month. Whilst driving into Frome is always going to mark the absolute end of the journey, in some ways making it to the familiarity of Greece will maybe mark the end of the ‘adventure’. We shall see!