Driving Through Africa

Driving through Africa offers a truly exciting adventure and there are plenty of people who welcome the challenge. Couples like Janet and Chris are half way through a two-year trip around the globe in their Toyota camper van. They reached Egypt in November (2007) and have now driven through the Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania where they celebrated becoming grandparents earlier this month. Janet spent her 60th birthday overlooking the falls at the source of the Nile in Uganda -- "we had a wonderful panoramic view of all the white water, and all the locals going over them strapped to Plastic petrol cans".

On the other side of spectrum, 4 men from South Africa decided to deliver pizza from Johannesburg to London in under 40 days -- they made it with a freezer strapped to the back of one of their 4 BMW motorbikes (which held the pizza). While obviously their journey was about making speedy time across the continent, their updates are hilarious and still informative about traveling conditions in Africa. "Libyans found us an oddity, as witnessed by the number of cars that passed us with the driver’s cell phone pointed in our direction to either take a picture or a movie of our progress. You might have noted, correctly, that it is not strictly normal for the driver of a car to be operating his cell phone camera while simultaneously operating heavy machinery on a national highway. Especially if said heavy machinery is careering into oncoming traffic while overtaking 4 motorcycles that are already doing 120 km an hour."

These blog posts and much more can be found on the Africa Overland Network which currently has almost 200 members who are overlanding through Africa and updating their sites regularly with interesting travel information, anecdotes and excellent photos. You can easily waste several days on this site. And if you like the idea of Overlanding in Africa, but don't want the hassle of building a custom vehicle or spending years on a trip -- look into the idea of an organized Overland trip. It's cheap, adventurous and a lot of fun.

_{On the road in Namibia - Image © Michael Daecher}