London to Cape Town - 10 Minute Route Planning Film
 

If you are planning an Africa Overland trip in the near future we compiled a 10 minute film that offers an insight into the road conditions you are going to face if you travel the West Coast / Central African route towards South Africa.

From the deserts of North Africa and the lush greens of West Africa to the mud of Cameroon and rain forest of Gabon, this video has the lot.

We started in Morocco in Sept 2010 so it was pretty hot in the deserts (48'C max shade temp) and arrived in Cape Town end of May 2011. We managed to avoid most of the rains but still found plenty of mud in Central Africa.



You can down load the GPS track and way points for the entire route at our GPS page

We did a fair bit of off-road driving as well as main roads so the video has a mix of road types for you to see. We must stress that this route was done in the dry season. Overnight rains and the wet season change roads very quickly, so don't think it will be like this in West & central Africa all the time!!

We hope you enjoy it as much as we did driving it!

Safe travels!

Nick

Thanks Nick, I enjoyed your 10 minute film (and, more importantly, have enjoyed you blog over the last few months).

However, if those roads are the worst that (western) Africa can produce then we might as well stay in Oz where we’ve driven over “all of them”, albeit not all on the one trip. Just kidding.

On the other hand knowing that the roads appear to not quite the major challenge I had anticipated makes the prospect that much easier, not that at our age we’re looking for challenges, rather, experiences.

No doubt South America and the ‘stans will produce some “challenges”.

DickyBeach

Hi Dicky Beach

U Tube only let you upload a maximum of 10 minutes so I had to cut out a few road sections. Some of the harder roads we didn't actually film as were too busy sweating / getting bitten / digging etc.....

I wanted to show that the basic main route as its perhaps not as bad as people first think BUT the one caveat is we did this mainly in the dry season and some of these roads change into mud traps in the rain, esp. West & Central Africa.

New Years Eve 2010 we spent 5 hours going 500m on a short off road section in Cameroon.....just after 1 night of rain the road we drove in on became a totally different undertaking - the hard stuff is there if you want it ;-))))

Cheers

Nick