Still, I can’t do anything about war zones, but the other problem – not been able to drive though Russia at more then 43 miles per hour, I have a solution for.

After talking about it with friends last night, the solution as I sort of mulled over in my post is to travel west. This solves loads of problems in one go – Firstly, I can fly to over the Atlantic, and buy my camper van there. As a result, I get right hand drive which is a bonus considering most of the world drives on the right, and I’ll be able to drive all the way home without having a massive ocean crossing at the end.

This also means that if I travel around the US, Central and South America for a year or so, I should be able to hit Russia with the two years driving under my belt I need to drive at full speed.

It does seem to be the wrong way to travel, but I wonder if that’s just because as a European we tend to head over land towards the East, where as from the US, people would head naturally West as for them thats towards the biggest land mass. So that’s something that I should do a little bit of research into.

War and unrest on the other hand is more wide spread then I really ever thought about, Iran, Libya, Iraq, Sudan and a many other places the Foreign Office tells you not to travel to block Europe from some of the places in Asia I’d like to visit and make moving through Africa tricky as well. The solution is to drive though Russia for a good portion of the journey.

Looking over the Foreign Office Travel Advice pages makes for some very gloomy reading at the best of times, and while it does provide some useful information as to areas that are particularly unsafe to travel too, I think you do need to read between the lines on many of the entries as it’s clearly written to ensure that you can’t come back and say you weren’t warned about a situation by the government. Just reading the entries for France and Spain – places people visit with out giving a second though to – you’d get a very uneasy feeling.

Then there is another hickup – If you haven’t been driving for more then two years, the speed limit in Russia is reduced from 60ish miles per hour to 40ish. One option might be to go West rather then East, which would mean starting in the US, heading down, then back up and across to russia that way, if I take long enough I’d be able to drive at full speed by the time I got there. An additional perk of going the wrong way would be meeting people going East and finding out good places they’ve just passed though.

Nothing here makes for a real solid assessment, it’s all just ideas and random thoughts still at this stage. I’m planning on picking up a good size world map to stick on my wall so I can pour over something a bit more tangible. And finding all these issues has made me look at the world a bit more closely, and give a lot more thought as to the more practical aspects of world travel.