London to South Africa 4 x 4 Africa

Hey There

Myself, 5 mates a Land Cruiser and a Land Rover are planning a trip from London to South Africa for November next year and was wondering if anybody knows anyone who has done this trip ?
We are originally from South Africa and have been living in the UK for 12 years now and have been talking about doing this trip for years so figure the best thing to do is to stop talking about it get the ball rolling.

I have found a fair bit of information on this trip but nothing within the last two / three years and Northern / Mid Africa current affairs are changing all the time with regards to danger zones and no go areas etc.

Also looking for any advice on budgets and costs involved on this sort of trip, I am currently looking at a 2003 Land Cruiser Amazon with 89,000 miles on the clock, my budget for a Vehicle is around £12000 and would be looking at spending a further £2000 to get off road ready, extra fuel tank, extra spare tyres, roof racks, winch etc etc ( Second hand where possible as costs quickly rack up )

I have worked out a very basic fuel to miles ratios and it is looking like in an ideal situation the fuel would cost around £4000 per vehicle, so basically i've said to my mates if we budget each around £3500 spending money, what are your thoughts on that ?

Also what sort of time frame would you think is realistic ? We do not want to break any records and attempt doing it in 10 days etc but we also do not want to just cruise along over a few months as we all have work commitments .... Ideally we would like to do it in a Month ???

Any advice at all would be much appreciated, being South African we are aware of all the visa implications, as we need visas for just about every country in the world.

Look forward to all your comments and advice

All the Best

David France

Hello and welcome to the forum David!  

Were you aware that one of our community here set off from the ADVENTURE OVERLAND show tail end of last year heading for SA? The thread for them entitled Kapp 2 Cape: Nordkapp to Cape Agulhas starting Oct 2012 can be found in the CURRENT - Overland Trips & Expeditions section as they are still on the road.[/b]

David,

Excellent idea!

There is tons of information as Tom pointed out below.  You can also head over to our website (www.kapp2cape.net) which is slightly broken and will be fixed when we are done with our adventure.

Also, we have been trying to keep the blog (www.kapp2cape-blog.net) up to date although that is challenging in Africa ...

Any questions, please fire away and we'll do our best to answer (internet connection dependant ...)

Best of luck with the planning!  And yes, after 12 years in the UK I was also in need of 12 months of wall to wall sunshine!

rgds
African GirlChild