Route & Maps
The first thing we did when we got the idea to do this was to look at a big world map we had on the wall. It gave us a good idea of what sort of distance were thinking of and what places we could go through. You could pick a few spots you really wanted to see, and see what other interesting places sat along the lines drawn between them. As we were essentially using this trip to return hh East Asia and finally Australia. We really only had a limited time of about 5 months that we thought we could ome, we couldn’t deviate too much from a fairly neat line across Europe and Asia, and down into Soutafford to take off work and actually be able to save for. We have some friends, Charlie and Nina, who are doing a much bigger trip, basically a big figure eight to Singapore and back from the UK, but they are doing it a year. Have a look at their site, No Job Will Travel, to see what they are up to.
Moscow street signs
Once we settled on a loose route we headed down to Stanfords in Soho… the world’s largest map and travel book store don’t you know :) We bought the best maps we could find for each country we’d be travelling through. We were going to use a GPS but there is nothing like having a paper map to use as well. A good idea is to find ones with English and local names on them, especially when you start looking at places in a different alphabet like Cyrillic for Russia and Mongolia or Chinese characters. We also bought a small map distance reader (a small rolly thing that you set the scale and then roll it along your route to calculate distances). Armed with these maps and an abundance of floor space we set about finding all the town we’d go though and stop and, and working out distances and driving times. We obviously know we are going to be doing a lot of driving, but we don’t really want to be driving 8 hours each day, so we started up and excel worksheet and started doing a day by day plan with the starting town name, ending time name, distance, what we thought would be the approximate time required, and if there was anything we would need to do like a border crossing. After we trawled through all the maps we could see approximately how many days we would need and found that it fitted in just about perfectly! We could then go back and split up some of the longer days into two, join up a couple of shorter ones, or add or remove a spare day in a city. You can view a pdf of our expected route/time/distance planning here.
Chinese street sign... i really hope this is a joke :)
We also bought a bunch of Lonely Planet books for all the places we were going though. We already had a Europe one, so we picked up a Russia, Kazakhstan (not Lonely Planet for this one as we couldn’t find one), Mongolia and South East Asia
Armed with our new knowledge of the route we thought we’d put it into our old Garmin Nuvi 310 Sat Nav. Now I already had 2 year old maps for all of Western Europe, and I bought *cough downloaded cough* the Garmin Worldmap. In my research I’d found that most people said the Garmin Worldmap was ok, but that a set of maps called Wanderlust by a guy named Smelly Biker were better. It only cost US$50 to become a member and you download the whole set. Basically this guy just rides the world mapping it, and also gets maps from many other people who travel around and just map the roads and trails they travel, then he compiles thwem updates his worldmaps. best thing it has over the Garmin one though is that it is routable. What I mean by this is that you can open up the MapSource software that most likely came with your SatNav, load in the Wanderlust maps, and you can start making the software plot routes between towns. The Garmin Worldmap won’t let you do this. We spent a couple of evenings putting in our route that we had worked out, and updated our figures of distances as the ones form the map are more accurate. We were quite pleased though that we were always pretty close. We actually broke the one long route up into day long chunks so we could see daily distances.
The next plan was to load these one to our satnav and check it all worked. It didn’t. The maps loaded on fine but our old satnav wasn’t capable of having the pre-plotted routes uploaded to them. So we forked out for a new satnav. We found a brand spanking new Garmin Nuvi 765w on sale at 33% off so we snapped it up. If you look at the Garmin website you’ll see the 700, 800 and 5000 series (I think, check yourself though) can have routes uploaded to them. Another advantage of this satnav over our old one is that it stores all your driving history and route in a log that you grab out of the unit and show on your mapping software. So hopefully at the end of the trip we’ll be able to get the exact route we took, and see how we deviated from our original plan :)
We are also taking with us a small Samsung NC10 netbook. It should be small enough to lock away safely, but it will allow us to make up new routes if we want without having to use the dinky satnav screen, and we also have backups of the software and maps on there too. Oh, and the satnavs can only have 10 pre-programmed routes on it, so we’ll have to swap them in and out as we go. Not really much of an issue though so its fine.
So armed with our GPS and paper maps we should be hopefully be able to go just about anywhere… in theory :)
