Preparation and the budget

The journey has now started and as I said on the previous post, I want share some tips for people who would possible like to do a similar trip.

I started the planning about 6 months ago. I've spend hours on reading countless blog posts and websites for information, panicking about what to pack, figuring out the route and the places where I want stop.
I found other travel blogs to be very handy when I was trying to find information, so I wanted to share as well all the information I thought was useful.

I was first supposed to go alone, but few months ago my flatmate Julia decided to come with me for about 2 months ( I guess I sold the idea to her, while rambling about my plans for several months :D) But I have to say it is definitely a relief to go with someone, especially at the start of the trip and it's awesome to have a friend with you to share the experiences!

The budget

When planning a longer backpacking trip I always find it hard to figure out how much it would possible cost me. There's so many changing aspects that it' s hard to figure out how much the budget should be. From the internet you can find some information on how much others have spend, but of course that varies with different people a lot. My plan is to travel reasonably comfortable, but with a low budget. Staying in hostels, couchsurfing, airbnb and maybe doing some work for accommodation on some places.

I'm planning on travelling about 10-12 moths, depending of course how I'll manage to stay on budget.
My budget for the whole trip is about 7500€ +the preparation cost (see below). My monthly budget is 500€/ month.

The route

The route starts from St.Petersburgh, Russia and continues with a train through Russia, Mongolia, China, possibly Tibet, Nepal, India, Myanmar, South-East Asia and finally flying to Australia to work. The plan is to go as much as possible by land and to take time in each of the places to really get a touch of it.

Few things about Tibet:

You can only visit Lhasa without a guide, but if you're planning on seeing more, you need to book a guide or a tour. I read many blogs and website's and couldn't find a way to go around it. So I'm thinking about taking a tour through:http://m.budgettibettour.com. It is a bit pricey, but I should have that much extra on my budget to be able to do it.

The trans Siberian railway can be done in one go, or planned with stops in between. Our trip involves many stops and we're planning on using our 1 months visa until the end!

Our stops in Russia:

-St. Petersburg
-Moscow
-Kazan (This stop is not officially on the trans siberian rail)
-Yekaterinburgh
-Novosibirsk
-Barnaul (this stop goes a bit off as well from the official route, but what I've read it should be a lovely city and it is also easy access point to the beautiful Altai mountains)
-Krasnoyarsk
-Irkutsk (Baikal lake, probably one of the most popular stops on Trans Siberian rail)
-Ulan-Ude

The preparation

The preparation has cost me altogether 1433€.
That includes; travel insurance for 1 year (through a company called; truetraveller which was 384€, a vaccinations (hepatitis A&B, japanese encephalitis and rabies) which were altogether 628€ and the visa's for Russia/1 month (91€), Mongolia/1 month (70€), China/3 months (105€) and India/1 year (155€).

The Chinese visa is valid from 30-90 days and when I applied for the 90 days visa I had to write a travel plan and a motivation letter to my visa application. I had no problems getting the extended Chinese visa, but just in case I did put some effort to write my motivation letter (complimenting the country as much as I could) and my travel plan. Also if you're planning on visiting Tibet while in China, you shoud not mention that on your application (as I heard it would not get approved)

With the Indian visa I was struggling a bit, since it says on the embassy website that you can only apply the visa 8 weeks prior to arriving the country. So I sent some messages to the Indian embassy asking if I could apply the visa earlier (since my trip was starting many months before I was actually going to India), but I got very unclear answers from them. I then called a Finnish travel agent company who organizes the Indian visa's and got a clear answer; so since the visa is valid for 1 year, it really dosn't matter if I would enter the country in 8 weeks time or later. So for the visa application I had to write the arrival date to the country as I would be going in 8 weeks time, but I was told that it wouldn't matter if in the end I would go there later (as long as it was inside 1 year).

That was all the visa's I needed to get in advance and rest of them I should be able to get from the border.

Where to book the train tickets

The next thing to do was to book the train tickets! When you write trans siberian train tickets on google, you get a lot different website options where you could book the tickets. My options was none of them. It is lot cheaper to buy the tickets straight from the Russian railway website; http://eng.rzd.ru. The page can be translated in English and the tickets were a lot cheaper from there.
I have now booked the tickets all the way from Helsinki to Ulan-Ude and the total cost has been: 247€

From the official Russian railway website you can only book tickets within Russia, but if you want to save some money on the border crossing, the cheapest option would be to take a bus from Ulan-Ude to Ulan-Bator (zabaikalomuud.wixsite.com). The bus is not only cheaper (we paid about 30€ online), but it also takes less time.

I couldn't find a bus operating between Mongolia and China,  but I read from some blogs that the cheapest option would be to take a train from Ulan-Bator to Zamin Uud, then take a taxi to cross the border (I read there are plenty of taxis by the border which will take you from Zamin Uud to Erlian for about 3,50€ and then take a bus from Erlian to Beijing. Altogether this should cost you around 26€ (according to what I read from blogs). The alternative price the agencies had for the train was over 100$ each ride (some pages even gave me a price of 200$ from Ulan-Ude to Ulan-Bator) so I'd say we saved a quite nice amount by skipping the train on these locations.

What to pack

Reading travel blogs and getting a lot of great tips from friends, I manage to decide what to take with me for this trip.
I have 65L backpack and the final weight was about 12 kg. That includes:

The lifestraw bottle is awesome! You can fill it with any tap water and the filter inside will make it drinkable. We've used it now in Russia and we haven't had any problems.
Less plastic waste and no need to buy water bottles everywhere.

All packed

I'll update more tips and information from the road and will also keep you posted on my monthly budget!
You can also follow my route on a map, which I will be updating when ever I change places. You can find the map from the side bar on my blog's front page.

The route map at the moment

If you have any questions, feel free to ask me, I'll try to answer as well as I can :)

On the next post I'll share my experiences from St.Petersburg and Moscow!