was looted multiple times during shipment. In the second half of the journey, they used phone calls extensively to communicate with people in Hungary. There were plans to turn the team's travel diary into a book, as well as making two documentaries about the expedition; one for general audiences and one for radio amateurs, with copies of the latter being sent to the amateur radio organizations of the countries they have visited. Timeline The expedition officially started on 23 October 1991, when the bus and the team departed from the Heroes' Square of Budapest, Hungary at 2 pm. They spent the first night near Nyíregyháza, and on the next day they crossed the border with the newly independent Ukraine at Záhony. Around December 1991, the bus and its crew arrived in Tehran, Iran (a country which did not formally recognize radio amateurs) without a local radio license, despite eight months of preparatory work and several written applications to the Iranian authorities, the last one of which were sent by the Hungarian telecommunications authority on their behalf. The expedition managed to obtain a written temporary permission to operate their equipment from the Frequency Department of the Telecommunication Company of Iran (TCI) after four weeks of nearly daily personal representation and lobbying at various government departments. In early 1992, the team operated in India, where the authorities initially assigned the domestic call sign VU2GBX ("GBX" stood for Globex), but the team requested a change to the guest call sign VU/HA5BUS, which included the well-known call sign of the expedition. Their requests were deemed to be in contrary to local radio licensing regulations, but the authorities nonetheless granted them, acknowledging the international aspect and significance of the expedition. Around April, operating in Bangladesh was also problematic, but the team managed to get a permission, "activating" (making contacts from) the S2 area – Bangladesh – for the first time after a roughly 10-year period of inactivity. They operated in Bhutan around early May. Early on, the tentative land route included Myanmar and the Malay Peninsula (Thailand, Malaysia) towards Singapore as well, but this part of the route was skipped due to concerns about the hostilities in Myanmar, and therefore the bus was shipped from Kolkata to Sydney through Singapore, affecting the team's schedule. They also had to skip their plan to land in Perth and cross the Nullarbor Plain eastwards because of shipping logistics.