Smooth take off....

First lesson learned! If you are going to travel for 4 months and spent weeks planning and preparing the trip, you could (and should) also take a minute to check the departure time of the first flight. It appears to be pretty stressful (adrenaline kick similar to bungee jump, sort of) to discover at 7.30am that your flight leaves in 2 hours as opposed to 6... Particularly if there is a pile of stuff (also known as your home for the next few months) on the floor of your living room that is still to be squeezed in a 50 liter backpack, anti-malaria pills are yet to be picked up at the pharmacy and the fridge is full of products that most likely will march out in a few weeks if not thrown away. Also, the luxury of a last nice, hot and clean shower would have been appreciated.

Major advantage though: no time to worry about the survival chances of a flight with Air Rossiya. Btw, tip for anyone who wishes to travel to St Petersburg from Amsterdam and tries to determine the value of his or her life (i.e. is my life worth more or less than the EUR 1000 difference between the Air Rossiya and the KLM flight) - it is a code share flight.... Poor old man in the back of the plane who has a KLM boarding pass.

Anyway, tnx to an unidentified person at the pharmacy and a "don't worry, 15 mins is more than enough time, be happy" cabdriver (who coincidently also travelled on the Transmongolian), the first destination, St Petersburg, is reached. Air Rossiya turned out to bit pretty good actually.

Further itinerary:

Moscow - Transmongolian Express with stops in Siberia and Mongolia - Beijing - yet unknown destinations in China - Xining - Lhasa - tour around Tibet - Nepal - India - Hong Kong/Macao - Bali - Singapore - Dubai - Amsterdam

Last but not least, St Petersburg turned out to be the NYC of Russia. Yeah!


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Location:St Petersburg, Russia