Tickets purchased. At least some of them. The ones you can call a good start and that makes the point of no return crossed 😉

Warsaw – Moscow – Novosibirsk – Irkutsk – Moscow – Warsaw, these parts are ticketed. I will buy the Vladivostok – Irkutsk tickets before the trip, as this can be done online. Still, I have to wait a bit, because pre sales at rzd.ru can be done max 45 days before departure and we’ll leave Vladivostok at the beginning of October.
The rest of the trip (Irkutsk – Ulanbataar – Beijing – Harbin – Vladivostok) will be booked on-the-fly! Hopefully we will fit our timeframes 😉

Today I also applied for visas. We don’t need the Mongolian one, but we need the Chinese and double-entry for Russia.
The latter country has a zoning related to the registration of residence, so, being registered in Subcarpathia I needed to apply for visa in Cracow. Since I live in Warsaw this would make a bit of a problem, thus I decided to use an agency. They will get me all visas by the way. I think it had been a good choice, as the excess money I spent were not that big and finalized the whole case in half an hour needed to get to agency and leaving them passports.
Visas should be ready in two weeks.

I promised you a few details of the trip (all times are local):
– we leave Warsaw on 8th of September at 12:40. We land in Moscow the same day, at 16:40,
– train departures from Moscow Yaroslavskaya on 9th of September at 0:35 and arrives to Novosibirsk on 11th of September, at 11:32,
– we spend half of day in Novosibirsk; a stop to rest out of the train, see a bit of a world and to refill the supplies
– we leave Novosibirsk on 11th of September at 23:04, we are in Irkutsk on Saturday, 13th of September, at 8:08 (1:08 in Warsaw;).
– we want to leave on 30th of September, at 19:10, so we could be in Irkutsk on 3rd of September, at 18:35,
– we depart from Irkutsk on 4th of October at 13:00 and after 6 hrs of flight we arrive to Moscow at 14:05. 5 hours to change the planes and on 18:50 we fly back to Warsaw.

These are all concrete things for the moment.

We have 17 days to make the Irkutsk – Ulanbataar – Beijing – Harbin – Vladivostok route and do the sightseeing around. This can be done unless we have transportation problems

Costs summary, as for today, per person:
– Warsaw – Moscow – Warsaw plane tickets (Aeroflot): ~210€
– Irkutsk – Moscow plane tickets (Aeroflot): ~230€
– Moscow – Novosibirsk train: ~105€
– Novosibirsk – Irkutsk train: ~60€
– visas + agency: ~200€

We will probably double the above during the trip.

Enough for today. Tomorrow morning I am taking my motorbike on an adventure to Tatry mountains. It seems it will be a rainy adventure though 🙁