African Odyssey NZ Update
 

Hello everyone,

Just thought I'd drop a post to the forum to let everyone know how we are getting on in our travels.

Myself and three friends (all New Zealanders) are doing a Capetown to London overland trip and are currently 3 months in. We left Capetown early August and have travelled through, SA, Botswana, Namibia, Zambia, Malawi and Tanzania to get to Arusha today. To date the scenary, people and experiences have been fantastic. For four guys who basically knew nothing about motorcycles or africa when we started this trip, it has certainly been an eye opening journey.

From here we plan to loop around the west side of lake Victoria to Kampala and Jinga, then head east to Kenya before hitting Ethiopia, Sudan, Egypt, Libya and Tunisia then ferrying to europe. We just picked up our Sudanese Visas from Dar es Salaam which was suprisingly easy. We got a letter from the British High Commission there (which basically only listed our names and that they had seen our passports) and then took that with our passports and photos to the embassy. Then we went to Zanzibar for a few days, came back and they were ready. We have been communication with Hadi who posts on the hubb regularly about Libyian Visas, and are probably going to use his company to get us through Libya.

On a mechanical note, our two 650s (KLR and NX) and two 250s (TTR and XR) have all handled the trip pretty well. We had a broken rear suspension arm in northern SA but that was easily welded up by a generous local farmer and has since been fine. A sticky starter motor, broken panniers and loads of flat tyres has been the extent of the other problems.

Time wise we are behind schedule and we are going to have to pick up the pace a bit if we are going to make our end of January arrival. If anyone else is on the way down this route it would be great to catch up along the way. We passed four motorcycles loaded up in northern Malawi who were heading south while we were going north, any idea who that was?

So far we havn't had a single incident of gear being stolen, bribes being asked for or paid. Fingers crossed that dosn't change...

Happy riding,

Phill

Hi mate!
 

Hi Phill

I thought I'd say a big hello from NZ.
I am 23 and planning my own little odyssey for January - Los Angeles to Rio de Janiero. A friend mentioned your website and I'm really stoked to see some kiwis doing similar things.

On a side note I bumped into Gareth and Joanne Morgan on the Rimutakas this weekend and they mentioned your site also was great. You're getting some real interest from people back home.

Stay safe. We're buying KLR650s ourselves so good to hear you're finding them good.
Josh

Re: Hi mate
 

Hi Josh,

Nice to hear there are some other trips in the pipilines back home. Good luck with the planning, sounds like grest fun. You won't regret it!

We crossed the equator yesterday and have moved into Uganda. Kampala has the most chaotic driving I have ever encountered - great fun though, if you don't mind almost getting run down by a mini van at every intersection.

Next stop: Jinja .

Cheers,
Phill