Hi, just to add our 20p; we set off without GPS (the camcorder was a higher priority) but our families insisted we take a satphone.

Quite honestly not much use if you're stuck or have a mechanical, but for those special occasions (christmas, birthdays etc.) when you might want to park up away from crowds it's nice to be able to call the family.

Ours turned out very useful in another situation: if it all goes pear-shaped at home, our tenant stopped paying!
Not having to depend on telecenters was a boon, and on the Iridium Africa plan through Satcom Distribution our prepaid minutes cost less than most call centers in sub-saharan Africa.

It was also fun to text other travellers via the Iridium mail-to-text service.

It's sitting in a cupboard somewhere now, waiting for the next trip, by which time the batteries will be too knackered to take a charge...

We wouldn't have forked out for one, so I have my dad to thank for the help it brought us.

A dash-mounted GPS would have been a nice gadget (very visible too) particularly useful in some of the cities (the vector maps available for most of Africa are so poor it's not really worth the investment).

More traditional navigation methods still work and have the advantage of being less nickable :-)

Cheers
Luke

Rhona & Malcom, good to see you're home safe!