Hi Ollie

A friend of ours (travelling on American passport, but just backpacking, not overlanding) applied for his turkmen and iran visa in Uzbekistan. he had a 40 days visa for Uzbek and needed the 40 days because he had to wait around for a couple of weeks for his Iranian visa and another week or so for the Turkmen visa. You have to have one before the other (can't remember which way around)

We just finished the reverse route(well almost) of what you want to do. This would be my suggestion and here is our experience with timeframes.

I think you can quite easily get from St Pete through Moscow to Volgograd and entering Kazak at the Atyray border in 3 weeks. There is hardly anything to see between Moscow and Volgograd (obviously depending on the route - we took the most direct route because of winter weather)

For us, St Pete and Moscow was just about the highlight of our trip and definitely worth the extra kms (We didn't go to Iran and Turkmen though)

Maybe you can do russia (St P>Moscow>Volgograd) and then through Azerbaijan into Iran (not sure if this is possible) and loop up through Iran, Turkmen Uzbek etc. (Besides from desert and steppe, there's not much in west Uzbek and Kazak as well). I think you can enter Uzbek from Turkmen close to Nukus in Uzbek. This way you will be able to maybe apply for the Iran and Turkmen visa in Moscow (again not sure if possible??) and you can still do the rest of central asia going uzbek>tajik(pamir)>kyrgyz>kazak>russia etc.

We bumped into someone in Dushanbe who works in Kabul (for almost 5 years) and we asked him what he thought of entering Afghan with a vehicle because we were considering this and he said that we would be a very easy target for kidnappings etc and he would not recommend it at all. He said that there has been a big increase in kidnappings of american/british and any other rich nationality where a high ransom can be demanded. He also said that entering northern pakistan would be looking for trouble at the moment. He even adviced our backpacking friend who was going to go to Kabul not to walk around to much, but use taxis and to stay in hotels with armed guards at about US$70 per night. I'm not sure if he was trying to use scare tactics and if he was exaggerating or not, but thats his advice.

If you cut out Russia then you cut out Mongolia as well. Is this a place you wanted to go to (very nice place btw)?

Hopefully this won't confuse you any more than you already are...

__________________
www.seeyouwhenwegetthere.com