Steve and Jan's African Travels.
Africa Overland

....................Your never to old to fulfil your dreams.....

In November 1997 we set off in "Ollie" our Land Rover Defender to fulfill a long time ambition and drive through Africa. Although we had been planning and fitting out the Land Rover for a couple of years we never seemed to be able to make the decision to go. The catalyst to stir us into action was provided by me being made redundant from my job. I was 53 years old so we said now or never and jumped into the unknown.

Our route took us first through France then to Algeciras in Spain, our departure point for Africa. The ferry from Algeciras took us to the Spanish enclave of Ceuta on the northern tip of Morocco where our journey really began. We drove through Morocco to the western coast and down through the Western desert a long hard drive. From there we crossed into Mauritania then Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso, Cote D'Ivoire, Ghana, Benin and Togo, here sadly, our Trans-African plans came unstuck, some Overlanders had been murdered in Central Africa and the advice was not to go there. Instead we Packed Ollie into a container and shipped him to Durban in South Africa where we continued exploring that part of the world. In 2000 we started to drive back up the East coast heading back to the UK. We got up as far as Malawi and then began meeting vehicles heading back to SA due to war between Ethiopia and neighbouring Eritrea.

Now we were running out of time and decided that the only course of action was to go back to Durban and ship Ollie home from there. We'd had a great time, on the road for about 18 months, covered over 45,000 miles had some great adventures and met and made many new friends.

On the Home page we have links to Janets diary for the countries that we travelled in.