About 10 days before departure.

There is about 10 days before we depart from Toronto to Shanghai!!! We are starting to run around, to finish what is needed to be done before we leave (most clever sentence written today!). We got our travel insurance. Emilie has pretty much completed our possible itinerary in China and drew a beautiful map.
More about our route can here.

Visas in Hand

We picked up the Vietnamese visas last week, and as promised the visa officer had tacked on a fourth month at no extra charge! How generous. We are now pretty much set in terms of visas. We might have applied for a Thai visa, although they are not necessary for tourists staying under 30 days. Of course, the situation may have changed these days...

192$ Visas

We got our Chinese visa yesterday, which we felt was a great deal, 50$ for a 3-month visa. I had read that the 3-month tourist visa wasn't always issued, so we were happy to get it at no extra cost. We then drove over to the Vietnamese embassy, the visa process is a little bit different there. You have to give them the dates you will be in the country, then they issue you a visa for that time period, usually a visa lasting only 1 month. Of course, we have no idea of the exact date we will enter Vietnam, so we applied for a 3-month multiple entry visa. This also allows us to cross the border as many times as we want so that we can visit Laos and Cambodia and then return to Vietnam. We were shocked by the 192$ price tag! After we paid the attendant told us she would throw in an extra month on the visa "just in case" . This leads us to believe that there might be a floating price on this visa. However, we are happy to have it.