Travel Updates

January 9, 2008 by Rick.

While the web is a spectacular resource, the abundance of misinformation (sometimes intentional but mostly human stupidity or laziness I believe) seems to cast a shadow over relying on it too much. We looked up information on getting travel Visa’s to India and their site said we needed bank statements with $1500 per person and we needed to show purchased tickets OUT of India as well. So, we diligently went to the Emirates office in Shanghai to purchase tickets out of Mumbai to Nairobi Kenya, smugly thinking to ourselves; “What could possibly go wrong?!?” Well, two days later was the election, the rigging and the pursuant chaos and killings. What could go wrong indeed…. We are currently tentatively planning on maybe changing our tickets to go to Tanzania instead of Narobi from Dubai.

The cool thing about buying Emirates tickets was that it was only $25 more per person than some other smaller airline, but allows multi-day stays in Dubai while passing through without a monetary penalty. We have three nights planned there now so we can take the kids skiing, for the first time ever in their lives, at the indoor ski resort in a +40 degree desert. A very cool (yet likely expensive) opportunity to be sure. I’d also like to see the “soon-to-be” tallest building/tower/structure in the world, not to mention the sail hotel and all of the outrageous manufactured palm resort islands.

So that portion after Dubai is still up in the air. At the airport tomorrow we’re going to try and change the tickets to Dar Es Salom (sp?) instead of Narobi. We only just booked a Delhi hotel tonight and have yet to design any sort of route or plan for India at all! Much to do… In India we have to do about three mini DVD video camera backups and uploading of still pictures to the gallery. Luke had told me the other day that the gallery wasn’t fully loading when he showed his “classmates”. I think that there’s almost 600 pictures there now, so we might have to delete some. It all loaded fine for me tonight though. We had planned on using a second gallery for 2008, but I just haven’t been able to get the pics off of those discs yet. Plus I need a computer with an FTP program to change our main index page with the links to everything, (including the new picture gallery page). Hopefully in the next week!

I received an e-mail from another “James” family in Washington who are planning a similar twelve month trip to ours for July 2008. He was casually asking about any suggestions or recommendations. Hah! I have tonnes… I plan on writing them out on a separate page linked from the top left in the next month or so, with additional updates and edits along the rest of our trip. Their website is:
http://thewidewideworld.com/

Posted in 2007-12 to 2008-01, Hong Kong & China | 4 Comments »