Destinations:

So we go! But where? It's impossible to see the whole world in six and a half month, so we had to decide where to go. If you don't want to spent to much money the continents remain, namely South-America, Africa and Asia. Africa was taken immediatly from the list because Annemarie did not want to go there. Both South-America and Asia are nice, but we think that Asia is a bit safer. So Asia will be! To be precise, Souteast Asia.

Asia isn't next to our door so we had to find a way to get there. You can book a flight with e.g. destination Bangkok. But there is much more to see when you book a train ticket. That's why Moscow is our starting point from where we travel with the Trans-Mogolia express to Beijng, with stops in Irkutsk and UlaanBataar. During these stops we will visit the Baikal lake, the Gobi desert and Hustai N.P. This trip is booked at Tiara Tours (dutch travel organisaton). From Beijng we we want te travel southwards to Indonesia. Before we definitely go home we want to make a trekking of one week through the Himalaya.

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House:

We own appartement in 's-Hertogenbosch which we want to rent, so that the monthly cost are covered during our trip. In first instance we engaged two house agents, namely DirectWonen and Rots-Vast Groep. From both agent people came by to have a look at out appartement. DirectWonen immediately placed an advertisment on their website and made an appointment to come by to inspect our appartment. We agreed with them that Rots-Vast did not try to rent the house for two weeks. After six weeks no result from DirectWonen. All the appointments that were made were not or too late cancelled and so one of us was waiting.
Rost-Vast did not much better. We had the agreement that an advertisement of our appartment would be on their website from the first of June on. Nothing happend! Phoned them, no result, phoned them again, again no results. Gave up after four phone calls.

Them we got the tip to put an advertisement on in forum on a website of a large plan for new-contruction. This was the golden tip! Within a week we got two (real) inspections. To one of them we rented our appartement. The best thing of this all is that it clicked immediatly with them. Now I am questioning, who come that eigth weeks of "searching" of those house agent did not have any result....

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Paper & co:

What to say about all the things you have to arrange where paper is involved? With papers I mean everything: insurances, money, cars, etc.

We gave the parents of Annemarie authority over our bank accounts so when it is neccesary they can take care of our banking business. We make copies and scans from the official documents. The scans we place somewhere on the internet which we can access always when needed. The numbers of these documents and information about our insurances, credit cards, etc. are registrered at Interhelp from the Rabobank (dutch bank). This is another precaution in case something happens with these documents we can arrange a lot with only one phone call.

Travel- and health insurances are arranges by our personal insurance agency

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Luggage:

And than off course a big questions:"What do we take with us?". We have two big backpacks and a small one backpack. Despite the limited space we have I am confident that we take too much with us (feeling from ealier holidays).
During the first part of out trip probably is could, becaue we pass Siberia and the Gobi desert. After that we travel south to China and then even more southwards then it gets warm again. At the end we want to make a trekking through the Himalaya which is could again. Both of us take an old winter coat with us which we will give away at the moment we meet higher temperatures. Clothes that we dit not want to give or throw away we squeeze them with vacuum bags.

Beside the underwear and sockes we take with us a first-aid kit and a multitool. The first-aid kit is hopefully not needed but it is something to have with you. The multi-tool is a good replacement for the tool box. Tiara Tours had the tip to take a shammy and a sponge to clean the window or our coupe. Otherwise we book a train trip to see more and the window is dirty. Furthermore there will be in our backpacks: pockettorch, quick drying towels, bidon, dice game, books and the electronics device to take care of our bank accounts.

Especially not to forget are the photo cameras! We take two cameras with us, a digital compact camera and an (borrowed) analog SLR camera. By storing the pictures digital as well as on film we hope to minimize the change of losing a lot of pictures

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This website :

I liked to make a website with our trip as subject. On this website we are able to write stories and place photo's about where we have bin. Beside that there is a guestbook so you can leave a message. I also wanted to find out how a website is build, because I never did it. I know the program Dreamweaver and heard about HTML but I had no idea how they work. So I got some books and started to read untill I had the feeling I knew enough to build a website that would satisfy requirements. After reading, some trail version, pottering, search the intenet this is the result. I am for 95% satisfied about this website. Still there are some things that annoys me.

We also liked to have a nice address instead of a difficult, boring address you get from a provider. We thought about evenweg.nl and ffweg.nl. "ff" is a pronunciation abbreviation of "even" and that means "for a moment". The translation of "weg" is "away". We could have known that these addresses are already taken. In the end the address is ffazie.nl. Hopefully you can figure out what that means.

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