Making progress

With about 6 weeks before departure, we're finally making some progress on reservations and narrowing down what we are planning to do.

For China, we have the hotel in Beijing and I just made reservations at the Li River hotel in Yangshuo. That leave Xian--we may wait until we get to Beijing to make that move. So much will depend upon being able to get the "soft-sleeper" train from Beijing to Xian and again from Xian to Guilin. While I love the idea of traveling by train for both of those legs, they don't open up reservations until 4 days prior to departure. The soft-sleeper is a compartment with 4 bunks and a door, as opposed to a hard-sleeper with 6 bunks and a curtain. I don't mind sharing with a couple of other folks (in fact would like that) but if our only option is a hard-sleeeper or a chair, we might just fly. Yes, we are a bit spoiled.

We've gotten the Kenyan camp issue resolved as well. For the first leg of the trip we'll be at Joy's Camp--it's built on the site of Joy Adamson's home. For those of you old enough to remember, she wrote/lived "Born Free." It looks beautiful, but then I was reading how she was murdered by a disgruntled employee, and her husband was murdered a few years later as he was trying to rescue some tourists from poachers. Hmmm.

Well, back to obsessing about packing.