While planning the trip to China through Russia and Mongolia, I realized that it was going to be an order of magnitude more involved and expensive than I had thought.

First off were the vaccines: Hepatitis A and B, plus Polio. Those three come to about 1300 NOK, through the student medical service. Second was travel insurance, which gets to be relatively expensive when you need it for six months: another 2300 NOK. Can’t really do without either of them; I value my health, and I will, after all, be schlepping my laptop and camera through two weeks and nearly 1000km of travel. A grand total of 3600 NOK.

Second are entry visas. Russia is notoriously anal about visas, and require that you have an official invitation from someone (like a hotel, friends, family) and a date of departure before they grant you a visa. In total, that comes to 1100 NOK, by way of exorbitant handling fees (…). Mongolia is easier, though they do require that you send them your passport. All in all, a single-entry transit visa (good for 5 days) comes to 450 NOK. The Chinese visa, depending on whether or not I get a double-entry visa (so I can travel to Macao or Hong  Kong and “back” again) or a single-entry. So somewhere around 750 NOK. All together, not including the postal fee of sending my passport to the Mongolian embassy in Belgium: 2300 NOK.

The plan is to fly to St Petersburg (1600 NOK ticket), see the city (and the Hermitage) for a few days, and then take the train down to Moscow for another few days. I’m assuming we’ll be paying around 200 NOK a night at a hostel. What follows next is pretty much the main attraction of this trip: taking the trans-siberian railway from Moscow to all the way to Irkutsk, near the Bajkal lake and the Mongolian border. As far as I’ve seen, we can expect to pay around 3500 NOK for that leg of the trip; it should take around 4 days. Unfortunately, we won’t have the flexibility I would like with regard to departure dates. The Russian visa specifies both entry and departure, so we have to plan a schedule around those dates (once we get the visas). I need to find out whether or not it matters if our departure date is earlier than the one specified in the visa. We also can’t take either of the better equipped through trains until we hit Ulan-Bator (as they won’t allow you to jump off before the final terminus).

From Irkutsk, we hop on a train and to go Ulan-Bator, in Mongolia. That trip will cost around 1500 NOK and take 32 hours. After seeing Mongol, I would like nothing more than to run around on the steppe and fondle yaks. Honestly, I have no idea what we’re going to do there. I should research that.

From Ulan-Bator, we make like Djengis and invade northern China, going straight to my home for the following 6 months: Beijing. Around 30 hours and 1700 NOK.

Taking into account 8 nights in hostels at 200 NOK per night, that comes to 1600 in sleeping expenses, plus the four train fares. St Petersburg - Moscow is 300, Moscow - Irkutsk is 3500, Irkutsk - Ulan-Bator is 1500, and Ulan-Bator - Beijing is 1700. That comes to 7000 NOK in train fares and 1600 for the plane ticket, on top of the sleeping expenses. 10200 NOK plus whatever we imbibe on our way. Provisional numbers, but fairly close to what we’ll end up paying. I am looking another ticket arrangement that could potentially shave around 2000 NOK off the train fare.

The plane tickets from Oslo - Beijing could be had for 2600 NOK, one way. It hurts a little, but getting there is half the fun. This way, we’ll have a sense of how far away Beijing really is.

Unless we die on the way.

Contact

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Beijing, China