Thursday 10 February 2011

The plan so far

In case you are unfamiliar with what's been going on in my head since Christmas, here is the plan so far.  I decided to start my African overlanding adventure in Nairobi on the 2nd April and as flying is sooo last year, I thought it would be fun to indulge my love of train journeys and travel as far as possible overland.  Pesky Sudan gets in the way and it seems that a trip to Egypt would invalidate my travel insurance so Jordan would appear to be limit for safe travel.

The first main main destination is Istanbul.  www.seat61.com has a few suggestions for routes but my preferred one is to take the Eurostar to Brussels, eat moules frites for lunch, and then head to Cologne and the overnight train to Vienna.  From Vienna to Budapest then to Bucharest and finally the overnight train to Istanbul.

From here I shall be hammaming regularly and introducing a lot of hummus into my diet.  After a few days in Istanbul I will be heading through Turkey by train towards the Syrian border.  Syrian visa already procurred, I shall sail through passport control (ha ha) via microbus before stopping off in Aleppo.  Aleppo to Damascus with maybe a stop in Hama on the way before my first deadline which is to be in Amman by the 19th March to take a welcome respite from organising everything myself and join a trip for 8 days visiting the Dead Sea, Petra, Wadi Rum (sleeping under the stars with the Bedouins) before heading down to Aqaba.

Originally the plan was to take the catamaran from Aqaba to Nuwein, visit the Sinai peninsula and then the bus to Cairo but rather boringly I shall probably have to go back to Amman and fly into Cairo airport to make my connection to Nairobi on the 31st March.  Transitting in Cairo is still permitted according to FO advice :-)

I have been jabbed to within an inch of my life (rabies jab #3 has not been without discomfort) and have a prescription for a significant number of malaria tablets.  This is not a cheap business.

More details to follow on part II from Nairobi to Cape Town (Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Tanzania, Zanzibar, Malawi, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Namibia and South Africa).  There will be a lot of game viewing involved.

Cath's Grand Year Out

The idea?  Step back from the daily humdrum for a while, open my eyes to the big and beautiful world that we live in.  Generally relax...