The Grand Plan

Many people have asked us ‘what’s your route?’

Now this has changed a few times. There was a time when we planned to drive through Europe into Turkey, and then into Iran and then somehow ship to India and drive through Myanmar into Thailand and then down into South East Asia, shipping to Australia and then finally to NZ. The problems with this (aside from a few small issues in the Middle East), were the following:

1. Visas. You would think that Australians and Kiwis would have the same restrictions when it comes to visas. Not true. Hayden could get an Indian visa upon arrival, but I could not. Trying to plan a trip and have exact entry dates so far in the future was proving to be difficult.

2. Driving. Land borders between some of these countries  are few and far between, Myanmar (at the time of my research) was super difficult to gain entry driving your own vehicle. It went in the too hard basket for a while.

3. Shipping. Shipping a car (and then flying ourselves) was looking to be costly. Plus there is the small element of  ‘driving home’, we considered it cheating to be putting the car on a ship so frequently.  There is a lot of water to get around in. South East Asia!

4. Importing vehicles. Similar to shipping costs,  there was the cost of temporarily importing vehicles. Mostly this didn’t seem too huge, except for in Australia!  Seeing as we plan to settle in NZ, and I’m from Australia, it just seemed a little too ridiculous to pay the fee.

Now, we also had to consider the seasons. Will it be too hot? Will it be too cold? Considering we didn’t have an exact departure date and were relying on the flat sale (and therefore on real estate agents and solicitors) it was hard to plan.

We finally made our minds up. Based on ease of visas, weather, current world politics and least amount of shipping, we cam up with this:

UK to France. Make our way north east through to Germany, Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Russia, Mongolia, back to Russia to ship to Canada (much cheaper and easier than into the US). Drive down through USA, into Mexico then central and South America with a final shipment from Argentina to New Zealand.