In Uzbekistan we cycled the 100km from Kungrad to the Aral Sea and then from Tashkent onwards only – due to sickness everything else was sleeper trains, even if we had wanted to cycle all of it, the restrictive 30 day visa wouldn’t allow much time for sight seeing!

From Azerbaijan to Kazakhstan we travelled by train and ferry with only a little cycling.

Georgia: We entered the country via the quieter mountain border – it was downhill all the way to the capital! We crossed Azerbaijan by train so the only cycling was in and around Baku – however but did head out of the city to do a spot of Mountain Biking. (without panniers!)

Leg 2: Turkey looked like this – so that we could see as much as possible we used quite a few coaches to cover some of the distance.

Leg 1 from Zagreb to Istanbul ended up looking like this: We took one train in Croatia, the marker points are our overnight stops.

The “plan” (if you can call it that) was like this: The start of the route follows some of the Eurovelo cycling routes ( 6 and 13) , that get’s us to Turkey from where we’ll have to  follow our noses, something a bit like the map below. If we get to Beijing we’ll either fly home or get on the Trans-Mongolian train to Moscow and continue cycling from there. The map below is the rough plan.