From Gatwick To Cyprus, and beyond...

Thursday September 18th - Gatwick Airport

As we wait to board our flight to Larnaca, i thought that i would jot down where we are planning to go - we know that we've told everyone broadly the route, but in as much detail that we know, here is where we are off to:

Today - Cyprus
Mon 22nd - Athens
Thu 24th - Istanbul
working our way to Cairo over 6 weeks along the Southern Coast of Turkey for through Gallipoli, Kas, Ephessus etc to Syria, stopping off at Aleppo, Palmyra & Damascus, and further South to Jordan's capital Amman. From here we will go down to Petra and Aqaba, where we will cross into Egypt through Taba, and spend a couple of days with Susi as she is conveniently holidaying in the area! In Egypt we will visit Alexandria, Cairo, Luxor & Aswan, whilst in Southern Egypt take a trip to Abou Simbel, which is a strong recommendation from Lucy's Granny.

From Cairo, we are going to fly down to Mumbai, probably around the end of November. From here we will travel up to Delhi where we will hopefully be able to meet up with Lucy's sister in law, MIma, and tour around Northern India through Rajasthan, Agra, Jaipur, before heading South to Kerala to met up with friends Meeta, Graham & Arnie. We've got to pop back to the UK to wish Lucy's Granny a happy 90th birthday, and enjoy the stresses that being in the UK at CHristmas bring for everyone else, before we hotfoot it just in time to celebrate Christmas day in Hong Kong with Sue & Ed. We've then got to make our way to Singapore to pick up a flight to Perth on Jan 31st. 2 internal flights to Alice Springs (feb 4th) and then on to Cairns (Feb 8th) later, we're going to hire a camper van to drive down to Melbourne, picking up Nicky and stopping at Trish's en route. We fly out of Melbourne on 22nd March to Auckland, with visit's planned to see Wilfora, Jimbob no. 2, Alex & John (they dont know his bit yet) 3 weeks later on 12th April, we move onto South America, and land in Santiago, Chile before we left NZ thanks to the INternational Date Line. All we have booked after this is Rio - London on August 24th, and its not fixed, so if we decide otherwise, we might not be back for another 6 months....