THE ROUTE ACROSS THE WORLD

“What’s the route?” is the first question most people ask. “Depends”, I normally answer. There’s a huge amount of factors playing a role when it comes to our Route. A detailed route for 2 years would be beside the point anyway. This trip is vague on purpose. We’ll take the time to stay where we want to stay.

That being said, I get the question and we have a rough idea of what we want to see in the next 2 years. After all, I’m a project manager by trade. If all goes well, we will be overlanding most of the time and limit the amount of flights and shippings.

ROUGH PLAN: DOWN, UP, TURN RIGHT

Overlanding 2 years around the world. The rough plan.

2020: Drive down to South Africa via West Africa and up north again via East Africa
2021: Cross over to Central Asia and head towards Mongolia. Return via Russia.

Putting aside any unplanned events, this route will also give us some planned exit points after 6 and 12 months respectively. Both possibly important as we might get sick of travelling all together or just want to change the modes of transportation.

In case we can’t get enough and can afford it, we also have the possibility to add a 3rd year. In the 3rd year, we probably would ship the Pantherli to North America and drive to Panama.

PLANNING THE DETAILS

Now with this rough picture in our heads, we’ll tackle the challenges and planning needs as they come along. For now, we do have a more detailed picture of our route up until Guinea. As a project manager does, it’s all stored in a spreadsheet and an assortment of Google Maps. Perhaps I’ll take the time to post it here at a later point.
We have not yet decided on how quick we’ll do this stretch and will see, once we get going. After all, when scope and quality are set, time has to be flexible 😉

WHY AFRICA?

The typical follow-up question. Africa is an adventure for us – unchartered territory. We have made several trips pushing our boundaries and so far, every new challenge resulted in a new great experience.
We also don’t get younger. Carole is pushing for 30 and I’m already passed that. Most likely, we wouldn’t do a similar trip in 5 years.
We both never have been to the African mainland before. I believe it’s telling that we speak about countries in most other cases, but not when talking about African countries. This, we want to change, by experiencing the cultural, geographical and economic differences ourselves.