It's apparent from scanning down the page that updates to old faithful STTR are somewhat infrequent these days, even by my standards. What can I say, it turns out this whole rally planning malarkey is proving somewhat time consuming.

the major stresses at the moment are regarding visa applications - I never realised that completing two sheets of paper correctly would be so difficult or have so much riding on it. Good news though - finally made it to the Mongolian Embassy today and our first visa applications are go! All being well, I should collect our passports on Friday with a shiny new stamp in them.

I was shaking on the way to the Embassy this morning - a mixture of excitement and terror that we'd somehow messed up the application form and would be refused the visa. My stomach was in knots on the tube and I tried to remind myself, "it's not like it's a job interview or something". Unfortunately my inner Bill Shankly chose to chime in at that moment with, "no, it's much more important than that". Thankfully it seemed to go ok; the girl in the consulate briefly checked the form when I submitted it and didn't highlight anything untoward, so fingers crossed.

Elsewhere, we hope to get the van someday soon, and are starting to look at camping gear. Insureandgo have sportingly offered us 5% off the cost of travel insurance and my mobile phone company, who asked not to be named, have made a goodwill gesture of £25 towards the cost of texting back home whilst we're away. It's all helping, and I'm immensely chuffed to be able to direct your eyes diagonally upwards to our Justgiving widget, where at the time of writing we have achieved exactly two thirds of our fundraising target.

All of which brings me seamlessly to my final piece of news: our fund-raising night in the Prince Albert, Brixton on 25 June. We've just had the date confirmed but will hold off on details until it's all definite. Thankfully, we should be guaranteed a good crowd as it's piggy-backing on a very popular monthly night, so we're hopeful of getting a few more quid in. It's dangerously close to departure day, but far enough away we can hopefully get some friendly faces in the crowd. See you there.

Woooaaahhhhh! We're halfway there.....!

Not to Mongolia, obviously. That would see us somewhere in Kazakhstan.

Nope, where we are is pretty much just as exciting - a chunky donation from Colin yesterday took us through the magical £500 mark and meant that I could finally break into some classic Bon Jovi. It also gives me the perfect excuse to post the video - a benchmark of wacky, hair-related antics and no mistake....

Thanks to everyone who's donated so far! More donations from J's fellow Geologist Melissa and my birthday-sharer Paul have taken us up to the heady heights of £542 by the end of today. Amazing stuff - can't believe people's generosity! Just think of the quality music I might inflict on you should we near our target soon...

more route planning

This Mongolian driving looks to be a piece of piss! Check out Google's directions... at least it appears that there is absolutely no chance of us getting lost. Mind you, roundabouts can be confusing...

Route planning

We finally got the ball rolling on our visa applications tonight, sending fof the required info to apply for Letters of Invitation to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. In what I think is a hangover from the former Soviet days, many tourists need to be "invited" to visit by someone in the country - no rocking up on the border and milling about aimlessly once inside. In reality, the process has become more of a 'visa support' function - essentially a travel agency within the country will submit your details to the government, and all being well will provide you with a reference to take along to the local consulate. Given the main bit of the admin has been done and dusted, visas apparently only then take a couple of days to get sorted.

It's proved a bit of a bonus for us - much like the vast majority of the rest of our plans we've ended up sitting here in May going "Whuh?" at the realisation that this adventure, which has been in the planning stages since October, is now a mere 60 days away. Throw in an ill-timed (but much looked-forward-to) few days away in Belgium this weekend, and it was starting to look a bit tight to get 5 visas sorted in the time we have left. The LOI process means the bulk of the red tape can be sorted based on scanned documents, so hopefully we'll be ok.

One of the questions we had to answer for each country was our intended entry point, which forced us to properly look at the maps for the first time. Unfortunately, a fat red line indicating a major road in that part of the world can be misleading, and it's only thanks to Google Earth that we didn't take the "better" route (in terms of itinerary and seeing western Uzbekistan) down the west of the Aral Sea - satellite images show a barren and desolate part of Kazakhstan with a road that in places is nothing more than a dirt track. In addition, it seems to be about 100km from the nearest town and the thought of our non-existent car repair skills being pressed into action is just that little bit too terrifying at the moment. We've decided to go for the 'main' border crossing into Uzbekistan instead, near Tashkent. It has the advantage of tarmac, greenery, towns and a couple of very volcano-y looking mountains that got J very excited...... Apparently the time taken to get through this way is hit-and-miss - could be simple, could take 6 hours. But whilst we're out for adventure and remote villages, we'll quite happily go for being stranded at a major border for a few hours than lost in the desert somewhere near Turkmenistan....

Our intended entry point:

The 'other one'

We can do it too! With Kangoo

We have wheels! And a dashboard! And seats! And.....well, you get the picture...

We received official confirmation from Mongolia today that our vehicle has been approved! On July 10th, we will purr out of Highbury fields in a pretty dang sexy little white Renault Kangoo van. It's a veritable young pup of a thing - only emerging, blinking, into the world in late 2002 and currently almost as poorly-travelled as its occupants, with a mere 70,000 miles on the clock.

The journey from "souped-up Toyota Hilux Surf" to Kangoo as the wagon of choice for our journey was long, twisting and at times frankly preposterous - much like our eventual route from London to UB will no doubt prove to be. Following the rally meet up in November, we returned enthused and determined to do something huge for charity. Several glasses of Cava later, we'd nailed it: why not take a load of teaching supplies and name ourselves "Ulaan Book Tour" - and do it all in a mobile library?!

It quickly became apparent "why not". Mobile libraries are huge. They only have one seat. They weigh a ton. They cost a fortune. You probably need a special licence to drive one and the thought of trying to get it out of a pothole in the middle of the Gobi desert didn't exactly fill us with confidence.

So we kept planning and searching; licence restrictions meant Justyna could only drive a van up to a certain size, and once we were down to two in the team it was clear we'd need something we could manouevre, and conceivably push out of a sticky situation, between us. We also had to ensure we could meet the customs rules on tax exemption - which eventually led us to the perfect solution: a car derived van.

For those who aren't skilled tradesmen or small business owners, a car-derived van is one with the same front end as a car, but a van bit on the back. You probably could have worked that out yourself. Our theory, such as it goes, is that these things are meant for a bit of abuse by white van men up and down the country - if they can survive being revved around building sites and barged through non-existent gaps in city centre traffic, they can surely cope with a bit of corrugated desert track? Also, the space in the back could potentially provide enough room to curl up for a sleep should fear of the Mongolian Death Worm prove too much for us as we travel through the wilderness.

We've been really lucky to get the van we have, and I have to thank everyone involved in making it happen. Our focus was eBay and trying to fix up a 'spares or repair' Ford Escort or the like - to be presented with the opportunity to take such a mighty French steed is beyond our wildest expectations. We've not yet picked it up but the V5 is off to the DVLA and we're trying to sort insurance out.

Pics will, of course, follow once we can post them. Now, just got to sort some corporate sponsorship to give it that authentic "rally" look.