Look out Asia we're coming for you!

Woop, we've booked our next holiday! Part cruise part land. We fly to Beijing, China for a week land tour and then embark on a 7 night cruise from Shanghai and travel to Japan. How exciting. This is certainly a new experience for us and one we're really looking forward to. 19 days of seeing parts of the world we've never seen before and to top it off the ship we're going on, Spectrum of the Seas, is a brand newy. I believe it starts cruising in April this year, so it'll only be about 6 months old by the time our cruise comes around in October.

I booked our trip through Cruise1st after originally seeing this itinerary on Tripadeal. By the time we had decided to do the trip Tripadeal had sold out, I thought I'd missed the boat but was so relieved when I saw Cruise1st was doing a very similar tour. I paid our deposits and the balance is due in July.

We will need to organise visas for China, none are required for Japan, but from what I can tell we won't be able to do this until we have all our flight details. I don't think we'll receive these until about 4-6 weeks before departure. The visa required is a double entry and costs $139.50. We'll have to get some glamorous passport photo done! I'll also have to organise travel insurance, of course. Definitely wouldn't travel OS without it plus I think it is a requirement of this trip.

Our trip starts from Sydney so again we'll need to organise getting down to Sydney and whether we'll need overnight accommodation, all depends on our flight times. We could have flown from Brisbane but this was an extra $200. We are still considering this option as it might make it easier to organise as I'm only about 1 1/2 hours form Brissy airport. I have had a quick look at the flights and they seem pretty similar to flying from Sydney, they both seem to have a stopover.

I've been doing a bit of research on our stops on the cruise and made note of places to visit while there. We've got 3 stops - Osaka, Kobe and Yokohama. They all look like amazing places with a lot to see and do. As long as we're right with the language thing we should be fine doing everything on our own. I did read that the very first stop on a Japan cruise from China can take a long time to debark due to immigration. I was recommended to do a ship tour as this did speed up the process as you had priority. We'll see what tours are on offer and if there is a relatively cheap one we can do we may consider it, we don't want to waste precious time in a queue trying to get off the ship. Yokohama was listed as Tokyo but having done a bit of googling Yokohama looks like a very big city (I think it's only second to Tokyo) so at this stage we don't have any plans to travel to Tokyo which looks to be about an hour away.

We've booked a balcony cabin, I think we're hooked on these now, which is classed as obstructed. Port side 7116. I haven't been able to see what is actually obstructed it as there are no actual photos of this ship yet as it's not fully built yet. I don't think it's the tenders going by the Ovation of the Seas deck plans, but who knows. As long as we have a bit of a view we'll be happy. The travel agent did suggest a virtual balcony, she'd had one and said they were great, but it wasn't much more for a real balcony. About $100pp extra. It's nice having fresh air in your cabin and be able to relax on your own private balcony, especially first thing in the morning with a cuppa! As this is an RCL ship they have kettles in their cabins, which we think is awesome! We'll have to remember to pack or buy some tea bags to make sure we have enough and what we want.

There's about 228 days until our trip and it can't come soon enough. At least booking so far out it gives us something to look forward to as well as save up some spending money. Can't wait to try all the food (well maybe not all of the food but some!) and visit places we've seen on TV and magazines and hoped to one day go to. Tiannamen Square, Great Wall of China, Japan, travel on the bullet train so many new and exciting experiences. We better start learning a bit of Mandarin and Japanese. I've downloaded Google Translate which should help us with signs, menus etc and hopefully asking questions if we get lost!

The countdown is on, again!