So here comes the 2005 section of my gap year....drum roll please... I've just found out that Myles and I have skating tickets for Worlds Figure Skating Championships in Moscow!!! How lucky is that?! So now, instead of flying on 28th Feb, we're leaving on 8th Mrach so our trip coincides with it. Yey!!! We're flying from Heathrow to St. Petersberg. We'll spend a few days looking around the city and then we'll catch an overnight train (prob on 13th March) down to Moscow. After a bit more sight seeing, ice skating (I have to bring my skates to Russia-there's rinks everywhere!) and watching some great skating from the likes of Michelle Kwan and Evgeni Plushenko, I'm going to fly to Mongolia (on the 17th March) and Myles is going to fly back to London (18th). (Myles isn't coming to Mongolia and China now, but will fly out to Sydney the same time as me, to meet up on 3rd June) Once in Ulaan Baatar, the Mongolian capital, I'll spend roughly 6 weeks volunteering for Teaching and Projects Abroad. (From 18th March to 5th May) I'm going to work in an orphanage and also hopefully travel around the area a bit on my time off with some other volunteers. It'd be great to go to the Gobi desert and ride some camels! On 5th May I'm hopping on a train, with my sights set on Beijing. (Where I should arrive at some time on the 7th May) I have now booked a place on a tour across China with Imaginative Traveller. If you want to check out my itinery go to... www.imtrav.com/dossiers/aagc.pdf After a few days on my own in Beijing to make the most of the city, I start the tour on 9th May and finish in Hong Kong 21 days later. Some of the main sights include a visit to the Terricotta Warriers in Xi'an and staying in Shanghai. We will also climb mount Tai'an and stay in a few villages, to see what rural life in China is really like. I'll hopefully be able to amaze some of them with my great Mandarin by that point! Once in Hong Kong I'll potter around for a few days (the website for the hotel i'm staying at is...www.holidaycity.com/silvermine-hong-kong) before I fly out to the Land Down Under. First stop is Syndey where I'll meet up with Myles on 3rd June. So once in Syndney, we hope to find jobs to pay for the accommodation and food for the rest of our time in Australia and just generally chill. This should be our longets stay in one place for the whole trip, as we plan to fly to Melbourne about 5 weeks later. In the city home to the best programme ever...Neighbours! we will definately go on a tour of the set and probably spend the rest of the time trying to spot the stars from it!!! If you're lucky we'll also let you in on what's to come in the soap as the TV series is 6 months ahead of the UK! Uluru is next on the list. We probably won't spend too long here, just give ourselves enough time to go on a proper tour of Ayers Rock and that famous canyon. Darwin is our penultimate stop in Australia. Again, I don't think we'll spend too much time here, probably around a week to ten days. Long enough to go into a rainforest, visit the acclaimed national park and have our photo taken with a koala bear :-) And then...... Queensland!!! We want to spend quite a bit of time in Cairns doing the obvious; visiting the Great Barrier Reef, spotting sharks and crocs, seeing some amazing waterfalls and hopefully do a stint of White Water Rafting. woo hoo! Then it's time to say goodbye to the kangaroos and boomerangs for.......wait for it.......the U.S.A! Yes, our last port of call is Los Angeles. We'll stay here until one of two things happen; we run out of time or we run out of money! Hopefully I'll be able to track down the place I got my braid done last time I was there and I'll be showing it off to all you guys along with a decent tan (as it'll be the height of summer when we stay there!) at the beginning of September, when we are scheduled to return from our merry adventures.