· Visa
Because of the limited validity of most visas, you can't get them all before you set off, but you do need to get them before you arrive at the relevant border. For us this means that we will get some of them en route. The visa for Turkey and Jordan you can get at the border and the visa for Iran we will get in Istanbul or Erzurum in Turkey.
The Pakistan visa we obtained in London as well as the Syrian one (as particularly this one is hard to get on the road). The India visa we will get in Pakistan.
Crucial for obvious reasons! With Roel having a Dutch passport and Lizzy a British and Irish one we should not have problems to travel to the countries we would like to travel through.
Lizzy will travel most of the trip on her Irish passport. This might help because you never know what Mr. Blair and his American friend George Bush are up to in the future.
This is a customs document that entitles you to import your vehicle temporarily duty-free into countries which normally need a deposit against import charges. You need this for countries such as Iran, Pakistan, India and Australia. While travelling you must have the document (a 5, 10 or 25-page booklet) stamped on your entry and exit from each country you visit.
In England the carnet is issued by the RAC. Sue Collins (sjcollins@rac.co.uk) at the RAC can help with this.
We will apply for the Carnet in Germany at the ADAC (German automobile organisation). The deposit is only EUR 5000 instead of 5x current value of the car which the RAC requires. In Germany, Karina Stephani (karina.stephani@adac.de) deals with this.
(From the 1st September 2005 the ANWB in Holland have stopped issuing carnets and therefore we will get it in München (D))
Third party is a legal requirement in most countries and our insurance will only cover us until Turkey. We have organised a green card with our insurance company (2 months only as this was the maximum they would give us) as this is required for certain countries in Eastern Europe. Unlike in Holland, insurers in England will not automatically supply you with a green card for 12 months. You have to pay extra for the privilege and even then they will not insure us for the Ukraine and Turkey. This means for countries like these we will have to buy the insurance at or near the border when we enter a country.
- International driving licence
These are issued at the automobile association such as RAC/AA or ANWB, or even major post offices here in the UK. There seems to be some debate as to whether you need one of these or not. They're not very expensive, so better to be safe than sorry. It's probably clever to have a couple because then if someone tries to extort a bribe out of us by refusing to give it back, we can just leave it with them.
A health/travel insurance that will cover us for the (still unknown) time of our journey is obviously necessary. We learned from other travellers that there are only a few insurance companies that offer such insurance. We have obtained travel insurance from Navigator Travel Insurance, a tip we got from Mark and Amy (www.hectorsadventures.com).
Luckily, we had had quite a few travel jabs in preparation for our trip to Tanzania 18 months ago, including hepatitis A, typhoid and yellow fever, so when we visited the travel clinic at the Hospital for Tropical Diseases in London the only two vaccinations they recommended were hepatitis B and rabies. They also advised us to take anti-malarials (chloroquine and proguanil) in SE Iran, Pakistan and India, so we have stocked up on those as well.
