My partner and I are planning a trip from Australia to England (hence the title) to hit the road Oct-Nov of this year, arriving in the UK around a year later. A rough outline of the trip is below - but we have a few questions, particularly around which route to take once we get to India.

We'll be starting from the Kimberley, NW Australia (I work for an NGO, which is sending us there in about a months time - we'll do a cannonball run from Sydney on the bike), and traveling 2up on a 650 V-Strom. I'm a Kiwi, she's English, I'm 30, she's 28, we'll have around $40K hidden in our boots

After doing the top end of Australia, we plan to ship from Darwin to Dili, then ride up slowly through SE Asia, then fly the bike and ourselves to Nepal around March of 2013.

We'll then spend a bit of time in India, and it's about here that we're unsure as of which route to take next. I'm very keen on heading through Pakistan to Iran, then Turkey, Bulgaria, Hungary, Austria, Germany, France, England. However, I'm unsure about whether the Pakistan/Iran route is actually a good idea?

How does this actually work? My understanding is that we will have a police escort for part of this section of the route - is it only for small parts or the whole shebang? Does this add extra cost? Is the trip still good with the escort, or will we simply be driven through at high speed without stopping? Is it actually going to be safe even with the escort?

Our other route options are to head from Pakistan into Afghanistan - but I imagine that this would actually be a dodgier route - or to head from India and go through Tibet and Xinjiang and into Kyrgyzstan (if we went this way, then we'd aim to ride across to Turkey and continue as originally planned from there).

The China option is one that appeals to us a lot, but I understand that it is quite expensive? Can anyone give us a rough estimate of how much this might actually be? It'd also be great if we could be pointed towards any companies that can do this part of the trip? We'll have a bit of flexibility as to exactly when we enter China - if we're looking April-May, is it likely that we will be able to find others doing the same route to split costs with?

Many thanks for any advice you can give