Wow, planning a trip like this is so much more complicated than we ever could have imagined.  We need visas for just about every country that we are going to and we are quickly running out of time!  Each country has its own procedures when it comes to obtaining a visa…some are super simple while others are very complicated.  Australia was has a simple application over the Internet and a small fee ($20 Australian). For China ($150) we had to go up the the Consulate in LA and drop off our passports and then go back and pick them up the next day.   The Kenya Consulate ($60) in LA was really nice and gave our passports back in about an hour.  After we had these visas added to our passports, we realized that we didn’t have enough blank pages in our passports to last the entire trip.  We became a little frantic because we weren’t sure if you had to give your old passport back to get a new one (meaning “goodbye” to the visas we had just gotten) or would we be able to have pages added to our current passports?  The passport office confirmed that we could add more pages to our current passport for a fee ($60)…unfortunately our only options to do this was either to mail our passports in for 10 days or go back up to LA to the Federal Building and drop them off and go back the next day to pick them up.  We have seen way more LA traffic in the last two weeks than we’ve ever wanted to see.  Once our pages were added, we sent our passports off to a service in San Francisco to get our India visas ($152 including expediting) and expect to get them back sometime next week, thanks to Jason at passportsandvisas.com. We’re still figuring out how to get our Brazil visas because they expire 90 days after the issue date and we won’t be in Brazil for over 120 days from now.  So far the only options we have is to either drop our passports off at the Brazilian Consulates in New Delhi, India or Johannesburg, South Africa.  But we’re a little worried because in most of these countries it is very difficult to travel around without your passports.  They usually want to keep your passports when you check into a hostel. So we still have to figure that part out…but that’s just part of the adventure!