Where In The World

Due to popular demand, well one request anyway, I've attached some photos showing our general travel intentions.  The solid black lines indicate air travel and red lines indicate general bicycle/boat travel.  It appears the only boat/ferry travel will be from Bali to the Indonesian island of Sulawesi.  The first pic shows us flying into Instanbul at 02:55 hrs and then catching a 07:30 flight to Van.  From Van we hope to get in some mountain riding and then return to Instanbul along the coast.  From there it's on to Bangkok.

A close up of Turkey

From Bangkok we plan to fly to Bali and either ride along the islands or, preferably, take a ferry over to the large island of Sulawesi (misspelled below) and ride/snorkel and pig out on fresh fruitd and seafood.  Then it's back to Bali and a stop in Bangkok to change planes for the flight to Hanoi. 

After riding the mountains of northen Vietnam we hope to enter Laos thru a remote, yet open, border crossing at Nam Can.  After probably a relatively short ride in Laos, we were there in 2000, the plan is to enter China at Boten, Laos.  We'll ride north to see Shangri La and Tiger Leaping Gorge, double back a bit to Lijiang and over to Xichang in Sichuan then north by northwest to Urumqi.  Here we should be able to get our visas for Central Asia.  After riding the Pamir Highway we head to Dushanbe.  Depending on the time of year, what we feel like (and how the bank account feels) we'll head home - or somewhere else.