Hello out there, i need some information about an africa trip my brother and i plan to do in July/August 09. Any info is welcome. At the moment i have the Sahara Overlands book on order but would like to try and find a trip path to start off with.

At the moment i am just starting a Civil engineering degree and my brother is just finsihing off his masters in civil engineering degree so for these reasons we only plan to make the trip last 2 months long as we will not have massive time between us to plan or organise the trip.

We either plan to enter through Italy to tunisia to libya, niger, Mali (maybe visiting timbuktu), Mauritania, morroco, spain then home.

Or enter from spain to morroco, mauritania then on to sengal to dakar or to mali to timbuktu then back home via near the same sort of route.

We will both be taking Yamaha XT660R's with some form of hard luggage on and carring extra fuel in containers as the oe tank only does about 120-130miles to a tank. We plan to do some sort of desert/sand riding and somesort of off roading but nothing hardcore expert type. We will camp out side in a tent or stay in BandB's what ever happens doesnt worry us.

I have measured it and say we could get to either italy or spain in 4-5 days so we would have around 50days to spend in Africa. Would either of these trips be possible in this sort of time? I no we will need visa, carnet's etc but just on an essitmate what would the price of this type of trip cost?
I understand that july and august is not the best time to go to africa in but is the climate going to be like, roasting, freezing, very wet??

Any info about these areas would be very welcome, and any tips of hints at where to look would also be welcome.