First of all we would like to thank all the person that followed us in the preparation of our trip and encouraged us in this project.
Particularly Pierre for all his help and work done on the mecanic of the car, his experience that he shared with Henri and all the time that he dedicated to prepare the Toyota. We wouldn't be anywhere without him. Thanks again a thousand times Pierre!
For any information about the preparation of the car you can follow the link (on top of this page) to our first blog dedicated to the preparation of the Toyota.
The departure is really close now and the excitement is growing up day by day.
With this blog we want to share our adventure with you, writing a sort of diary showing the places we will visit and countries that we will cross, the people we will meet and reporting our emotions and feelings.
So, why the name “Glareole” for the blog? Actually, everything started with this bird,
Glareola nordmanni.
Its geographical distribution is Asia and Africa but sometimes, during migration, it is possible to find it in Europe. Henri had the chance to see it here in Belgium during the fall 2009 and, after this sight, he started to search on line more information about the species and its distribution. Since that moment he never stopped to dream about a trip around Asia by car: the only way to stop that dream was to transform it in reality.
Our final destination is Mongolia, crossing East Europe and Russia. In the first plan we should have crossed the Scandinavia entering in Russia through St Petersburg. Unfortunately we are still here in Belgium waiting for the visas and finishing the preparation of the car and we do not have the possibility anymore to go up to Scandinavia. This will just be for another time!
Thus, we will cross Germany, Poland, Lithuania and Latvia and from there we will enter in Russia. Then we will follow the Trans-Siberian Route until the Altai Mountain and then up again to Lake Baikal. After this we will enter in Mongolia where we will spend one month. There we would like to help as much as possible the population with some humanitarian activities such as printing and distributing a health book that any person living in remote areas could easily use to prevent the most common diseases. Very few people have acces to medical care there so we hope that this will be very helpful for them. At the same time we will visit an orphanage and offer them warm clothes and boots for the children (temperature often reaches -40°C during the winter in Mongolia) and these items are the most needed according to our contact there. For this we dedicated a part of our budget and if you would like to contribute or support our idea, any help will be very much appreciated. If this is the case please contact us in a comment; simply click on the "COMMENTS" link (written in blue) at the end of this message and we will make sure that as much children will benefit from this action.
Messages written as a comment on this blog are absolutely confidential and will appear on this page only if you want it to (just let us know!).
Kazakhstan will be the first country on the way back, where we will spend another month. Finally we will cross again Russia to enter in Europe but we still don't know exactly the way back: either pass through Ukraine and go directly to Romania where we will spend a couple of weeks or cross the Caucasus and Georgia (or by boat through the Black Sea or Caspian Sea) to enter in Turkey. Italy will be our last stop before to come back to Belgium and we plan to spend there some time travelling to the South and visiting family and friends.
Here is the map:
Well, this is it for now and we can just tell you follow us and enjoy the trip!
