PHASE 3
7th September 2022 –
We are back on the road at last! Destination ARGENTINA.
The plan is to ship the car to the USA and then make our way down to Mexico, Central America to Panama, ship the car over the Darien Gap to Colombia and tour South America.
Shipping rates have gone through the roof so, to cut the costs, we had to ship the car on RORO service rather than in a container and our personal belongings separately on a pallet, to Jacksonville, Florida.
20th September 2022
Glad to say both pallet and car have arrived safely and we are finally on the road.
Our route to the Mexican border :Jacksonville to Ojinaga – 6,942 km
20th November 2022
Refused entry into Nicaragua because we have a right hand drive vehicle!!! despite our pleas and offer to have the car go through the country on a transporter.
Advised to ship it from Puerto Cortes in Honduras. Drove back into Honduras but could not get a reasonable quote so, decided to drive back to the States. Contacted our shipping Agent there hoping he could help to ship from Texas to Colombia, but did not come to anything .
We have a six months visa for the States so we will tour the South West instead!
We drove all the way back to Texas, taking a different route up Mexico.
17th December 2022
Re-entered the US at Presidio, Texas – destination New Mexico.
PHASE 1.
1st March 2019 – We are off !
We started planning our route several months ago, the plan was always to try to get away before the end of March 2019 to avoid all the potential Brexit complications!
So far we have what we call ‘phase one’ planned which takes us as far as Japan. In summary our route to Japan is sketched out as follows:
France – Italie-Slovenia-Hungary-Ukraine-Romania-Serbia-Montenegro-Albania-Greece-Turkey-Iran- the “Stans”-Mongolia-Russia-Japan
June 2019
In Uzbekistan I managed to break one of the rear leaf springs (part of the suspension) on some off road driving. My fault really as I was probably going too fast over a very bad section. We had to get the part shipped from the UK and lost almost 2 weeks!
October 2019
We flew back to London to meet our first grand-daughter born in July and spent a few weeks catching up with family and friends whilst the truck was being shipped from Yokohama ( Japan) to Port Klang (Malaysia).
Phase 1 : 38,210 KM
PHASE 1 in pictures
PHASE 2
November 2019.
We are now well into ‘phase 2’ of our trip which sees us travel through Southeast Asia towards India. Happy to say the truck arrived safely to Port Klang, with all contents intact. Over the last two weeks we have travelled across Malaysia and are currently in Thailand having clocked up over 40,000km since leaving London on the 1st March…
February 2020
Phase 2 is coming to an end as our Carnet de Passage is expiring on 25th February and we decided not to extend it. We will ship the truck back from Chennai to Southampton.
Itinerary: Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, northern Thailand ( as no direct entry possible to Myanmar from Laos), Myanmar and India. ( we wanted to go into Vietnam but were turned back as you need special authorisation for importing the car, was costly and would mean further delay so re-directed our route to Laos).
PHASE 2: 17,749KM
TOTAL TO DATE: 56,069 KM
December 2020
Further to the last entry above, little did we know then, that it was the right decision to come back to London as the UK went into lockdown due to coronavirus 2 weeks after our return!
We are know evaluating our chances to be able to resume our trip next year. The original plan was to do the American continent but we’ll have to wait and see…
