Bangkok to Beijing

tipperaryjim

Hi All,

Planning a trip for next year and we're planning on spenidng just over 3 months going from Nairobi to Jo'burg. This part of the trip is fully sorted and we are going on a tour with Oasis Oveland, a UK based expedition truck company. We will do this part of the tour from February to early May.

We are then flying from Jo'burg to Bangkok for the second leg of our trip where we hope to backpack overland from Bangkok to Beijing. We ar egiving ourselves from May to early August to do this section of the journey.

Has anyone done such a trip before and if so, have you any major recommendations?

I have travelled through Thailand before but simply didn't have the time to check out Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos etc. As such, we hope to take in plenty of these countries before doing a solid trip through China!

Any basic recommendations would be very useful as we're just about to plan a decent route for the Asia leg of the journey.

Thanks in advance

killbillvol2

You can enter Yunnan overland from either Vietnam or Laos without much hassle. It's a fairly well-travelled path. Yunnan would be a great place to start the China leg of your trip and you could then move northeast towards Beijing via Chengdu.

tipperaryjim

Yeah, I've heard that Yunnan is an amazing place so I can't wait to check it out.

Also, I totally agree that it's a well travelled path! We should hopefully have no probs getting something organised...

Keep the suggestions coming though - much appreciated

tipperaryjim

killbillvol2 wrote: »

You can enter Yunnan overland from either Vietnam or Laos without much hassle. It's a fairly well-travelled path. Yunnan would be a great place to start the China leg of your trip and you could then move northeast towards Beijing via Chengdu.

Hi killbillvol2,

Just a quick query you may be able to give me some help with!

We're going to book our flights for our trip this week but someone has told me that we may have some huge issues with our visa for China.

We would be travelling on a tourist visa and it appears that we would have to obtain this via the Chinese Embassy in Dublin before we depart. The potential sticking point is that it appears that the visa must be used within 30 days of it being issued. As such, this could cause us problems as we are travelling through Africa and Asia for almost 5 months before we arrive in China and as such, the visas that we obtained from Dublin would be expired.

Did you come across this in your own travels?

Any help would be much appreciated. Going to call the Chinese embassy tomor but I said I'd check in here to see if you've any thoughts on it!

Cheers,

Jim.

killbillvol2

You can relax Jim!

A Chinese tourist visa is valid for entry within 3 months of issue. In your case you just get the visa in Bangkok - any travel agent will do it in 4 days (quicker if you pay more) and there's absolutely no red tape.

So leave the Chinese visa until you get to that part of the world. And just make sure you have two clear pages in your passport - they take one full page for the actual visa and want the page opposite blank for entry and exit stamps.