With parts one and two of my Trans-Siberian trip, I’ve shown the fun of planning the trip from scratch. Since I’m going by myself, I want to get as much as possible planned ahead of time so there are hopefully no surprises.
Adventures with Russian visas
At $131 for U.S. citizens, I expected that hopefully the process would be rather seamless. Maybe it’s just me, but $131 is nothing to scoff at. However, it gets progressively more fun. You need a tourism invitation letter in order to apply for your visa. If one were taking a tour package, the tour operator would take care of this, but traveling solo means I’ve got to get this myself. An extra $30 on top of $131 doesn’t hurt the wallet, but still, you’d think that this would be easier.
Now here comes the fun part. According to the Russian Embassy in Washington, DC, they will no longer do mail processing of visa applications but instead, will recommend three agencies who will walk the visa over for you if you don’t live close to a Russian Consulate – for $50 plus shipping. Yikes.
After digging, I found Russian-Visa.com who would issue the tourism invitation letter and walk it over and FedEx it back to me for $65, which after all of this, seemed like a bargain. I could even do the Visa application online with them. And what impressed me the most was how responsive they were: I received an email when my passport arrived, another when they dropped it off, one when they picked up the passport with the visa and yet another when it was shipped back. Simply awesome! In an age where customer service is suffering, I was happy to have my beloved passport carefully taken care of.
Social networking and vacations
I’ve become hooked on Twitter. Yes, it has no real business model, but it’s a good way to post mundane and short blurbs when it seems like you don’t have enough for a real conversation. And Facebook has gone from something cool to an addiction.
Using T-Mobile’s unlimited international email for Blackberrys, I’ve decided that I’m going to document this trip both the classic way with two digital SLRs and a Moleskine notebook and the newer way — Twitter, Facebook and TwitPic. I’ve noticed that when I personally blog about a trip after I get back, I lose energy because it’s work trying to make a trip seem exciting after I’ve gotten back and most likely, told people about the highlights in person.
And in what seems like a good move to flaunt my geek credibility, I’m even doing a GPS tracking of the adventure. It’s one thing to mention the city where I am visiting in Russia, but it’s another to show it on a nice map.
So, if you want to track my travels as I move from Moscow to Irkutsk to Ulanbataar to Beijing, do the following:
- Add me to Twitter.
- GPS Tracking with Instamapper. I’ll try to fire this up every few hours to blip where I am, dependent on phone coverage.
- Flickr mobile photostream. Just camera phone photos while traveling, but it’d be sort of close to real-time. And geotagged.
- The Google Maps mashup of the Trans-Siberian Railway. Just to have an idea of where I’m going and what I’ve gotten myself into.
You can also add me on Facebook and I’ll even try to use Google Latitude along the way for tracking on your smartphone.
