Route

I had lofty ambitions of creating a highly accurate and interactive map with lots of buttons and fancy features for all you armchair travellers out there… but alas, even Google Maps is too technical for me. Luckily for you, I still know my way around a little program called MS Paint. Behold!

Oh, the places we'll go!
(Click to enlarge)

A thing of beauty, am I right? Getting those jagged international borders juuuust right was no easy task using the pencil tool, but I think you’ll agree that the results are of almost textbook quality.

The blue line is our intended path of overland travel. Starting in Cape Town, we’ll make our way along South Africa’s East Coast (beaches! surfing! penguins!), with a detour into the highlands of Lesotho (the kingdom in the sky) before continuing up the Wild Coast (where we’ll be staying in a treehouse!) to Durban. Then, it’s on to Jo’burg where we hope to catch a bus to the Zimbabwe border and onward to Bulawayo and Victoria Falls, where, resisting the urge to bungee jump, we’ll cross the bridge into Zambia.

From Zambia, we’ll be mostly in transit, but will be making stop-overs in Livingstone and Lusaka before entering Malawi. Once in Malawi, we’ll be spending the bulk of our time lakeside, popping our malaria pills with our pawpaw and waiting for the weekly ferry to come.

Relaxed and rejuvenated, we’ll head to Tanzania and the narrow alleyways and exotic scents of Zanzibar. We’ll then travel inland toward the lusher landscapes of Rwanda and Uganda, where we will most likely decide against doling out $500 for a gorilla permit (chimpanzees are reportedly about a tenth of the cost… and ten times the fun!) From there, we will travel west along the equator, through the tree dotted plains and deep valleys of Kenya, ending up on the island of Lamu― a paradisical place where donkeys are the main mode of transport. Finally, our last leg brings us to Nairobi, six months and more than 2500 miles later.