Editor’s note: This is the first blog post in a series written by Portuguese couple João and Margarida, who did an epic African overland adventure with us in 2019. The post has since been updated to reflect current information.
Since we started planning a world tour, we realized how big the world is. Even if you take a year to travel, like we are doing, you will quickly come to the conclusion that you cannot go everywhere you want!
First, we broadly decided the regions we wanted to visit: Southern Africa, Southeast Asia, Australia and New Zealand, and Central and South America.
From the start, we also decided where we wouldn’t go, based on a few rules:
Expensive countries that are easy to visit (so this excludes the USA, Japan, and will maybe exclude Australia and New Zealand)
Countries too close to home as we already know them a little bit and they will be easy to travel to anytime (so this excludes North Africa and Europe)
Unsafe regions (this excludes the central part of Africa and the Middle East)
Very large developing countries (India and China can have a trip on their own one day).
Lastly, we decided to break down the trip into three steps, coming back to Portugal for a few days in between each step:
As we started the task of planning a world tour, we decided to begin in Africa since it is the most challenging continent, in our opinion. We considered various routes and ended up with the following:
The first part of the trip will be with an organized tour. We will be part of a group of about 20 people plus a driver and a guide, together for 42 days straight! This is called an overland tour, and there are a few different companies doing them. We opted to book with African Overland Tours after researching and reading reviews for a few days. Our tour comes with camping accommodation, which means most nights we will stop at campsites, pitch the tents and cook the meals as a group.
Such a tour is more expensive than doing everything on your own, but the added safety was a deciding factor.
The tour will take us from Nairobi to Cape Town. Then, traveling from Cape Town to Mozambique, we feel comfortable enough to travel on our own, as South Africa is quite popular for tourism. As an ex-Portuguese colony, Mozambique will at least offer no language barrier!
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