on March 20, 2017
Sunny Cornwall has been very grey, a little rainy, but a few degrees warmer than oop north as usual. We’ve been trying to relax but also book the travel as far as Harbin in China. Our Russian visa is limited to 30 days single entry but the Chinese visa is much more flexible (multi entry 90 days at a time) meaning we can try to travel at a slower speed.
Our planned route to Harbin is this: London – Luxembourg – Amsterdam – Copenhagen – Stockholm – St Petersburg – Moscow – Yekaterinburg – Novosibirsk – Irkutsk/Baikalsk – Ulan Ude – Harbin
Ulan Ude to Harbin is booked through a company called Realrussia. They helped us out with the visas and also do train bookings, however after comparing some train fares they charge more than the russian railways website of course (rzd.ru), but in some cases double… So we have booked the internal Russian trains ourselves but as we can’t book Ulan-Ude through the state railway website we bit the bullet and paid a bit more through the agency. This was the most important leg to book, it goes once a week on a Wednesday! In the end the domestic trains between St Petersburg and Ulan-Ude work out less (in total) than Ulan-Ude to Harbin.
The Stockholm to St Petersburg leg is a ferry!! So excited about this. It leaves on April 8th and takes two nights with a stop in Tallinn. I had checked this a few weeks ago… since then it’s been fully booked or the route has changed! Argh. Change of plan – we now leave Stockholm on April 11th and the ferry goes via Helsinki instead. Not too bad a swap 😛 But is does mean a couple days less in Russia.
We planned to leave London for Luxembourg on 31st March. The coach is also fully booked. We leave on 30th instead…
Amsterdam to Copenhagen is a cheap but 13.5 hour long coach journey and we’re treating ourselves to the ~5.5 hour train between Copenhagen and Stockholm.
There’s a few more things to book (turns out Luxembourg to Amsterdam is not easy as the train is super expensive) but we have the key ones sorted already which helps, I feel it’ll be less stressful after reaching China but I’m sure there’ll be many more hurdles along the way!
Amongst all this organising we managed to make it to Swanpool beach in Falmouth, to eat the once a year ice creams it’s famous for. Look how good they look – Cornish vanilla ice cream coated in Cornish clotted cream and topped off with sweets or chocolates of your choice! Delicious 🙂
