Our original plan was to ride from the most westerly point of mainland Europe to the east coast of China. The real coast-to-coast. We have decided that the best way to tour is to wing it. We are not going to sit down and plan out our every move, I feel like this will just end up with us not being able to stick to the plan anyway so there is no point. We have a rough route planned out with some goal-posts, we want to meet some friends in Livigno for a little MTB weekend (yes, a cycling holiday from our cycling tour), and I am desperate to be in Tajikistan in early September so we can ride the Pamir highway (google it, you’ll understand). Visa availability is constantly changing and has dictated our route quite a lot. Currently it’s looking to be impossible to get a China visa on the road, so unless that changes in the next 6 months (fingers-crossed!) we may well end up unable to get into China. If thats the case we will probably fly south and cycle some of South Asia or New Zealand. We know the countries we want to cycle through, and have rough ideas of what regions would be nice and a very, very rough time-frame. Other than that, we’ll see how it goes.

 

Update:

We got to Kazakhstan after cycling the pamir highway and flew to Vietnam for a month. Unfortunately we didn’t get Chinese visas, but Vietnam was awsome, and after cycling from Ho Chi Minh to Hanoi we flew to New Zealand for just under 3 months. New Zealand has been incredible and we are now heading to Taiwan for 5 weeks before flying to Istanbul, from there we will cycle home. We should get home for mid-june 2019.