Preparations: The Itinerary

So this is it. We're going. Nerd as I am, I had to go to Google Maps and trace my itinerary, including every intermediate station that I found on the trains that we are (supposedly - but that's another post) going to take. Result: a few hours spent painstakingly finding villages in the middle of Russia, and an awfully cluttered map, which you can see embedded here but you'd probably be happier to view in a separate window (the link is below).




View Trans-mongolian route in a larger map


Actually, double-nerd that I am, I had to go and do this thing also on a different maps service, Yandex. The great thing about Yandex Maps is that they have much better quality maps of Russia than Google (they must have access to maps that Russia won't give to Uncle Sam), so you can actually see the railway line all the way through the trip. The downside is that a) the map cannot be embedded in the blog as coolly as the GMap above and b) the whole interface is in Russian. But if you want to go do the Trans-Siberian, here's the first tip: you've got to start learning some local language.

So get on with it and check out the Yandex map of the itinerary.