Third strategic meeting

With 54 fatal days to our departure, we have met once again on 27.4.2008 at my house to discuss further details.

This involved mostly:

1. Time plan concerning our visas and final division of responsibilities
2. Brainstorming on complete equipment for our trip
3. Discussion on how we will be financing our expenses while abroad
4. Next steps concerning course of our trip

1. Time plan concerning our visas
We already have visas to India :) ! Hooray :) !

As a next step, we need to take care of visas to Thailand. Martin is in charge of that and while the granting procedure is really screwed up, he is fighting hard. Since we have no flight tickets to Thailand and are therefore not entitled to receive regular travel visa and transit visa does not help us much (we need to entry Thailand 3 times altogether), we will have to write a special letter to the Ambassador. And hope he will anticipate our request :) ...

Afterwards we need to obtain visas to Nepal and Vietnam and we are all set, at least on the bureaucratic issue! Visas to other countries we are going to visit will be taken care of on the spot.

2. Brainstorming on complete equipment for our trip
We finally have almost a complete equipment checklist! Some of our items are:

• beach purse
• shitty watch
• PEPO
• lubrication gel (and candles)
• 5 clothes pegs
• weapon and tear gas
• mouth organ
• ear plugs
• chewing gums
• crayons
• leadership books (wtf?)
• small pillow

We already found some equipment at home, this can be seen on the photos. We will probably have to buy 2 new cameras as well, since ours are piece of ... Other important things to be bought are tent and backpacks. (I hope they make one with a porter, because we are not going to carry all the stuff ourselves, are we?!)

3. Discussion on how we will be financing our expenses
We need to analyze how much our home banks will charge us for an ATM withdrawal abroad. I am in charge of this "analysis". Then we will decide how much money we are going to exchange in next 2 weeks.

4. Next steps concerning course of our trip
Martin proposed that he will put together the most important information about each country and its beauties. This material should help us to gain the necessary background and the particular decisions on where to go will be made during our trip on a daily basis. I am in charge of preparing the trip through India, since this will be our starting (hopefully not fatal) country.

Random news and other announcements

• Vaccinations are going excellent. We are (or will be) vaccinated against hepatitis A+B, typhus, meningitis A+C, cholera and rabies and are still alive. Martin will not manage the cholera cocktail, so it is strictly advised to take at least strawberry cocktail with him, just in case diarrhea occurs.
• Insurance is almost fixed, it is not that expensive as we have expected
• Martin is arranging our Prague-Vienna return bus tickets

Well, if we will manage to fight our school responsibilities (which does not seem that positive on my side) we should be departing soon :) ! Stay tuned.

On behalf of the fatal crew :)
Zdenek

As usually, we had a lot of fun...