Route update for Beijing Rally

We have been following events in the Ukraine carefully, hoping that a change of route won't be required, but we've now decided that the recent escalation in the Ukraine will make our current planned route somewhat of a risk.

Ukraine is a sizeable place, avoiding it is not really a case of driving 100 miles around it. The two options are either go south of the Ukraine, which also means south of the Black Sea unless we figure out how to make our car amphibious. We would have to drive through Turkey, which we would have loved to do, but the additional mileage means London to Beijing will almost certainly take more than 28 days.

The second option is to go north of the Ukraine and drive through Belarus. The Belarus route won't have a huge impact on our mileage, so we have opted to go via Belarus instead of the Ukraine. This does mean yet another visa for us to obtain. Something we're now working on.

A recap on our visa situation. We have visas for Kazakhstan and Russia. Our Chinese and Mongolian visas are currently being processed, once we get those, Belarus will be the last visa we need.

Below is a map of our newly revised route.

We're now 40 days away from the Beijing Rally 2014 launch! Things are very busy at Rusty Rhinos HQ with visas to sort out, an engine to install into Red and GPS tracking to be set-up.