Spend several hours on the Russian rail website, trying to see what the train frequency is between each pair of cities that I have to stop in, i.e., every major town along the trans-Siberian, trans-Mongolian and trans-Manchurian railways, as well as BAM - the alternative trans-Siberian route. Well, in Mongolia and China I'm only really required to see the capitals and around, but would prefer to see more if I have the time.
Discover two things: that there are now railway connections between Vladivostok and Sovestskaya Gavan', and that travelling between cities will take considerably more time than originally thought. See, there I was, thinking that it would take me 4-5 hours to travel between, say, Komsomolsk-na-Amure and Tynda, only to discover that it takes 37 hours. This means more overnight journeys in platskartny (3rd class) than I care for - not sleeping due to lack of oxygen, or squalling babies, and then having to get out in the morning and run around a city I do not know, trying to make sure I collect all the relevant info before hopping on the next overnighter. How my editor thought I could possibly cover all the ground necessary in six weeks, I do not know. Even nine weeks will mean travelling under considerable pressure. I thrive under pressure.
Trains seem to be pretty frequent, particularly from Krasnoyarsk, roughly in the centre of Russia, towards Moscow, though I may get stuck in some godforsaken place for days when travelling on the BAM. I may end up getting to know Severobaikalsk or Bratsk very well indeed. Haven't even thought about my daily budget yet; the Moscow-Irkutsk leg is pretty expensive (£235), but what price sanity and a good night's sleep?
The next step is to figure out exactly how long we should spend around Lake Baikal and how many days I'll need for Mongolia because the Ulaanbaatar-Beijing leg sells out pretty quickly. Off to apply for the Mongolian visa tomorrow.
Fairly productive day. Manage to acquire free furniture for the new house because I was present at the inspection of the old house as the only former tenant who doesn't have regular work hours, and it turned out that all the furniture would otherwise be binned as the place is being refurbished. Aggravate an old back injury while lifting sofas in and out of the van, and have to be careful not to do any heavy lifting in the next few days.
Bored of working on the Peru chapter, I switch to the Chile chapter instead. It doesn't really matter which one I work on, since the priority right now is to get all the maps finished and sent off, and to do that, I need to finalise all the accommodation and eating options in all the major cities. Luckily, I managed to get a fair bit of work done while in Chile, whereas in Peru I found it almost impossible to force myself to work on both my blog and the chapter writeup at the end of a long day. Will have to become more efficient in Russia.
The maps are coming along nicely; though it's very time-consuming, it's one of my favourite tasks - marking everything on and meticulously checking every detail while listening to Leonard Cohen 'Live at the O2' - the gig I attended in 2008.
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