Slight hitch

Craig’s Chinese visa application was rejected yesterday, which means we also can’t go to Russia because we won’t have any easy/cheap way to get to Vietnam from there. But as this means we will have a bit more cash to spend overall, we applied for a three month Vietnamese visa (which came through this morning – took a total of one day with no problems!) in case we want to explore there more thoroughly. Sad to miss a proper winter and the train to Beijing etc but hopefully once the Chinese embassy has chilled out a bit we can do that some other day :)

So we took a deep breath and booked our flights today to Hanoi via Singapore, leaving on 15th Jan, and a nice hostel for the first night is also booked so we don’t have to tramp round with heavy bags looking for a place to stay…£1.28 deposit paid with the rest (£10!) to be paid on the day. It will be nice in a way to start off somewhere we have already been and choosing the “one way flight” option was very exciting – literally no going back. We also went into town to get all the essentials needed like Speedos (dear god), medicine, sunglasses, washbags etc. It feels a bit more real now!

P.S. A good money-saving website is Quidco.com, which is worth having a look at if you haven’t already – if you buy products online you can get cashback on them through this site. Our flights were £46 cheaper using a combination of this and voucher codes, my Autotrader advert for the car was £14 cheaper and it looks like we can save up to 20% on our backpacker’s travel insurance through them too. The cheaper we get all this boring stuff, the more we can do whilst we’re away, but it’s also handy for normal things like home insurance (which I got £75 off) and even Groupon (5% off).