Where to go?

My original travelling plan for Jim, was for me to take him to India. I had the romantic notion of finishing the conversion, quiting my job, and then leaving home, with just a starting point and a destination, leaving the route and pace to be decided as I went. As time went on, and I started to research the bureaucracy of overland travel, I realised that if I left without any preparation I would get as far as Turkey before an impenetrable wall of antiquated paperwork would halt forward progress.

 For a start, one needs a Carnet de Passage to be able to temporarily import a vehicle into Iran, Pakistan and India; without this document these countries have no assurance that you will not sell your vehicle once inside their country and avoid paying import duty. Secondly, one needs a Visa for each of these countries too, and each country en route has particular intricacies which make having a valid visa complicated. For example there is no Indian embassy in Pakistan, and so you have to apply for the visa in Iran. Also visas for Pakistan can only be gotten in your home country, which would be fine, except they are also only valid for six months, and so you have to plan carefully to avoid getting to Pakistan and finding that your visa has expired. A third complication is that in 2011, Iran all but banned dog ownership, making it a tricky country to travel through with a canine companion, even one as handsome as Boris!

Whilst I had not realised that I would have all of these complication, they were not enough to dissuade me from travelling this route. That changed recently, and my enthusiasm for driving to India via Iran and Pakistan wained. I have been reading a number of blogs of travellers who have transited Pakistan over the last few years, and have watched as the experiences of those travellers has gotten worse. The security restrictions, whilst previously restricted to border areas, have spread inward, and the distance the police escorts continue for has increased from a few hundred miles, to most of the way across the country. If you wish to drive through Pakistan now, you are pretty much escorted by police from one side of the country to the other; there is little scope for lengthy stopovers or sightseeing excursions. After rushing the 1,600 miles through Iran to avoid any dog related dramas, the last thing I will want is 1,000 miles of police escorts and sleeping in police compounds; I spent much of my youth avoiding them!

The combination of these factors convinced me that my plan to drive to India via Iran and Pakistan was too expensive, and would not give me to kind of trip I wanted. With this route ruled out, I began looking at the option of driving to India via Russia, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, China and Nepal. The visa requirements for these countries are generally more straightforward than those in southern Asia (perhaps with the exception of Russia), and I would not have to worry about the Carnet at all until I got to Nepal.

Unfortunately, among the bewildering array of ridiculous restrictions in place in China, one prevents tourists from visiting China in a foreign registered vehicle, without a government approved guide (read spy). I could fly to China, take the local driving test, rent a car and drive wherever I want, but if I want to use my own vehicle, registered in the UK, I couldn't even cross the border without a friendly assistant to monitor my movements and ensure that I stick the pre-planned route. This in itself would not put me off driving to China, as I can see some benefit in having a Mandarin speaker with me, but sadly the when I started to get quotes I realised what I was letting myself in for. I managed to get two prices form Chinese tour companies, both offering a spyde, and all the necessary permits (one for visiting the Kazakh border area, and one for visiting the occupied Tibet territory) for about £6,500 for a 30-35 day trip. If this wasn't bad enough, it became apparent that my friendly canine companion would have to spend about a month in Chinese quarantine.

Each bit of research I did, identified a new set of restrictions making every way of visiting Asia by road, complicated, difficult and expensive. I wasn't totally put off driving to India via this route, until I noticed that the RAC, the sole issuer of Carnet's in the UK, had withdrawn the option of paying the deposit with a bank guarantee.

For those that aren't familiar with this irritating but essential document, The Carnet de Passage is essentially an agreement from the RAC to whichever country you are driving through, saying that if you sell your vehicle whilst in their country, the RAC will pay the value of the Carnet to cover the avoided duties. The value of the Carnet varies from one country to another, but across South Asia and the Middle East, the Carnet value is 500% the value of the vehicle. The cheapest that I could reasonably value Jim at is £10k, as this the price that you could buy a good Mercedes 1823 box body truck for, although anyone who knows the value of the equipment installed will realise this is an underestimate. This means that the value of the Carnet for Jim, for a trip to India, would be at least £50k; this is not how much I would pay, but how much the RAC would need assurance that I could give them, if I didn't return from my trip with the vehicle. Until recently, there were three ways with which to reassure the RAC that you could cover the Carnet's value.

One: The simplest method that the RAC offer to cover this value, is for you to deposit the money with the RAC, where it remains until the Carnet is returned, with entry and exit t stamps for each country visited. You earn no interest on the money deposited, but the only cost is the £200 arrangement fee, which makes it the cheapest option. Unfortunately I do not have a spare £50k, and even if I did, I would not be able to cover the Carnet's value in this way, as the RAC puts a £10k cap on cash deposits.

Two: The RAC have an agreement with an insurance provider, which allows you to take insurance out, for the value of the Carnet, so that the insurance provider will stump up the value if you fail to discharge the Carnet correctly. Sadly, the insurance does not relieve you of paying the Carnet's value back to the RAC should you need to, it just enables you to take the vehicle through the relevant countries without having to freeze the Carnet's value in the UK. If you sell the vehicle and forfeit the Carnet, the insurer will pay the £50k to the RAC, and will then claim it back from you. This is a good option for people like me who do not have £50k to hand; however it does come at a price. The insurance premium is 10% the value of the Carnet, half of which is returned when the Carnet is discharged at the end of the trip. This puts the cost of this option at at least £2.5k, a lot of money for essentially no service at all. It is actually doubtful about whether this could even be called insurance, as the 'insurer' isn't actually insuring you against anything, all they are doing is offering to temporarily lend you the money (if necessary) whilst you look for a buyer of your spare kidney.

Three: The final option, now withdrawn, was to cover the Carnet's value with a bank guarantee. The simplest option to get this guarantee was to let your bank freeze the value of the Carnet (£50k in my case) in your account. If you do not have the value of the Carnet in a bank account, it was still possible to get a  bank guarantee, dependant on your relationship with the bank, or the value of your mortgage compared to the value of your house (if you have a house and mortgage). In many cases this option cost nothing to arrange, as it was simply an agreement from your bank that they would give your money to the RAC if the need arose.

For me this was the final nail in the coffin for driving to India. It is certainly not impossible to get to India via road from the UK (people do it all the time), and with a cheaper vehicle and no dog I would certainly consider it in the future, but this time round I want a trip where I can drive where I want, whenever I feel like it. It therefore seemed natural that we go to the home of the transcontinental roadtrip, and so we've decided to ship Jim to America.