OverlandSphere
Overland Travel, Expedition & Adventure Information for 4x4, motorcycle and truck overlanders
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Part 3: A gentleman is defined, not by the distance he keeps from his own, internal wildness, but by his ability to scrub up afterwards. Iconic (Photo: RWH) Having left all chance of contact with the outside, Dan and Alki dropped off the edge of our map and headed to the border of the Congo. Here are some of the…
Part 2: Iganga Hospital is a 200-bed district general hospital run, and largely funded by the government. It has male, female, paediatric and maternity wards, an outpatients department, pharmacy, laboratory, x-ray, ultrasound and an operating theatre. The gate opened straight out onto the main road and once inside there was always a great crowd shifting around the white buildings. Clusters…
Part 1: Children on the DRC border March 13 2013 Six feet in a drumroll syncopate with the downpour, rasping on broad-leaf snares. In an instant, we meet under haphazard semaphore, tumbling shrieks cut short. Each of us receiving a face; a frozen, flash photograph; glossy and sleek, panting clouds. Charging steep, you lead the game. Mouth set in mirth,…
It was about on day two that the bushes on our rear suspension failed. Long suffering, these rubber buffers prevent a metal on metal clash in the suspension components. Although this didn’t halt our progress, it made us wince every time we hit a medium to large bump, which happened about every three seconds. It did nothing for our confidence…
Just before you read the next installment, we would like to thank eveyone who has suported us by reading this blog, and by kind emails and messages. It has really meant a lot when the chips are down to know that people are thinking of us back home. We are now well over half way, and have clovered over 15,000…
Back at home when we were planning this trip, I would occasionally be asked which parts I was most worried about. I would reply Sudan or Northern Kenya, Somaliland having been a late spontaneous diversion. My worries were mainly based on a lack of knowledge about what things were like on the ground in these places, and the true risks…
The sun was almost extinct as we climbed the steps in front of Berbera police station to find an old man in a wicker chair. Two armed men in dusty berets flanked the Police Chief but he himself displayed no military attire. He wore only a swathe of burgundy fabric, richly embroidered and firmly swept around his bent body.…
Ethiopia, the homeland of Haile Selassi, is the heartland of Rastafarianism. As such Addis Ababa it is still firmly in the thrall of the Reggae that Selassi brought back from his exile in Jamaica. Before Reggae however the music heritage lay in Jazz and Swing. In the first decades of the 20th century Addis moved to the sound of Abyssinian…
It was a slightly drunken promise but none the less it was an invitation to Africa. Taking advantage of an absent boss, stretching one weeks leave into two and just enough time to get jabbed, insured and booted. I was off to Ethiopia to meet the ramshackle doctors on their travels. When I met them in Gondar it was the…
To travel by plane is to step through a portal. As immersed as you become in your new surroundings, no matter how real it all seems, you can always step back, blinking and surprised at how easily you fall back into your old routine. Sitting in the same seat that I left the pinpoint familiarity of my parents’ driveway, the…
We had developed a bad habit of Samosas. These little bundles of food poisoning sit for an unknown length of time in shops, quietly incubating before a hungry traveller, looking for instant gratification decides to take a chance. Rich had taken ill. After a long, draining day of Timkat festivities, Rich was put to bed in the tent whilst Dan…
Bulletin: We have finally decided upon a name for our Land Rover. Tess, short for Temeraire. Named after the Turner painting of the old warship being dragged in for scrap at the end of its days, temeraire (where we get the word temerarious) is French for foolhardy bravery. We felt all these things summed the expedition up. Like each city…
Rudely awakened by the burning sun, we pressed on. We watched the kilometres slide past, the landscape intermittently punctuated by ancient pyramids. Even with a solid road it took three full days to cross the desert, North to South. We arrived into central Khartoum almost unexpectedly. In the dead of night the suburbs gave way to the deserted streets, ramshackle…
It was with nervous excitement that we made our way from the village of Wadi Halfa, Sudan’s northern frontier town to the port, although we had come to the conclusion that this was a rather grand title for what was in fact a single jetty and crumbling customs building. Wedged into the back of a tuk tuk we watched Africa’s…
Knowledge You don’t need to be a mechanic to go overlanding! However you do need to be vaguely familiar with you vehicle. The most important things are preparation and maintenance. - Do as much of the vehicle preparation yourself as you can. This way you will learn about your vehicle, as well as what tools you’re going to need - …
This is specifically aimed for those buying Land Rover Defenders, but certain points are applicable to other vehicles. It is skewed towards those buying a Defender for an overland expedition, but is applicable to all potential buyers. Top tips: - Buy early, ideally 6-12 months before your trip. This gives you loads of time to get to know your vehicle…
Vehicle selection for overlanding is the biggest decision you will make, bar your route, as it will affect your life every day of your trip. The options are described below. Toyota Land Cruiser Hugely widespread in every European/African country, a Toyota 4×4 will be strong, reliable and good value. Expertise and spares are widely available, even in the back of…
Wadi Halfa is a Nubian town on the Sudanese shores of Lake Nasser. This huge man-made lake has divided the Nubian people and displaced them into southern Egypt and Northern Sudan. The deliberate inundation of the old city of Wadi Halfa is still a source of resentment and a favourite topic of nostalgic lamentation amongst the older tea drinkers of…
It transpires that Aswan is a tourist hotspot. We discovered this when we tried to buy a kofta roll and paid five times the going rate for it. People visit in order to cruise the Nile and visit the colossal tombs at Abu Simbel. We arrived however to catch the ferry to Sudan. For this reason Aswan is also a…
We decided to drive the Oasis road, looping for 800 miles west, away from the Nile, rejoining it at ancient Luxor. Diesel was a big problem. The country was virtually dry due to the conflict inhibiting trade. To avoid the day-long queues of lorries, one had to turn to the black market. Fortunately, Sam had a contact, Badri, a local…
In 1952, over the oasis town of Siwa, it rained for three hours. In this unprecedented deluge, the entire mud-brick town dissolved back into the desert. Surprised but unperturbed, the inhabitants, using the technique of their grandfathers, re-built the town as it stands today. Our stay in the super-city of Cairo was drawing to a close. This conurbation of old…
Merry Christmas everyone! You can find our Christmas video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a56bHM4hfMM&list=HL1356340210&feature=mh_lolz Yesterday we manoeuvred our car onto the Aswan ferry barge, at great cost to our nerves and some cost to nearby freight products that were crushed and mangled in the process of clambering onto the tiny area of roof space allocated for our car. An ordeal I think every…
Cairo – 10,472 miles The taste of freedom was fresh on our palates as we approached Cairo, and our excitement offset any apprehension we should have felt on approaching this hotbed of political strife. The world’s media was honed in on this city as the crowds expressed their discontent with the current government. The Egyptian people famously ousted their leader…
As we pulled our mud-caked vehicle alongside the twilight outline of the Flintstone’s Cave hostel in Goreme, Cappadocia we were greeted by welcoming staff and a few friendly Erasmus students. “Looks like you’ve had fun, what have you been up to?” one enquired. It would be a few days before the obscure images of the past 24 hours had cleared…
I am squinting into the midday sun, clinging to the side railings of our Landrover. Crystallized salt burns in the criss-cross cuts in my hands and my eyes no longer focus with exhaustion I am caked in drying clay that hinders all movement and dexterity Our car is tilting to roughly thirty five degrees, the maximum point, beyond which it…
We drove from the Turkish border to Tekirdag, a slightly grisly port town on the south coast. We arrived late and went in search of food. In a café at one o’clock in the morning we met Tayfur. Tayfur is a French language student studying in Tekirdag who very kindly offered to accommodate all six of us on the floor…
It was with a reluctant parting of eyelids and a woollen head that I surfaced. My slumber had been prematurely interrupted by shouted chants and sounds of a ruckus in the street below. I stumbled woodenly to the open window, squinting in the sharp morning sunlight. At length my eyes focussed on the Thessaloniki magistrate’s court not fifty yards away,…
Two things stood out from our brief visit to Albania, the cars on the road and their drivers. I read somewhere that in Albania 80% of cars are Mercedes. Although this seems ridiculous, our experience told us it couldn’t be far from the truth. This is apparently due to a large scale smuggling operation after the government collapsed in the…
I will have to continue this post as our only remaining Wallace has gone missing. He was last seen bartering with a wizened old man over the purchase of some antiquated padlocks. The price was settled at a bag of gold coin and Bas’ immortal soul. Bas certainly has an eye for a bargain. So with Bas otherwise engaged in…
If there is such a thing as simplicity in life, I have yet to find it. I had lamented over how previous life was filled to bursting with work, emails, social commitments, an over-stretched fleet of interests and ambitious future plans. “On this great journey we can live day to day, we can read books and write and develop new…