In April 2007 we left London on a flight to Johannesburg, ready to meet our car in South Africa and drive it back to London. The planned route is a circuitous one, taking us up the east coast as far Kenya before dropping back down and across to Namibia and then finally striking out up the west coast. The rationale for this is simply that we are greedy to see and experience as much of Africa as we can whilst we're here. We plan on this foolhardy trip taking 10-12 months but we’ll keep you posted!

Whilst we've travelled a fair bit, neither of us have ever been to Africa before. We're not medics or mechanics, nor masters of French, Portuguese or any of the myriad local languages we'll encounter and Jackie has never owned a car and only just passed her driving test. Throw Connie, our beloved rust-bucket, into the equation and it was always going to be challenging!

Now the practical bit. This website is a bit of an almagam and is designed to keep friends and relatives up to date with what we’re doing but also provide some information for people planning similar trips. And so it splits down as follows:

Trip reports is simply set out country by country. Scrolling through these in order will hopefully give you a good feel for our trip as a whole – what we did, where we did it and who we met.

For Overlanders gives the nitty gritty of costs, routes, road conditions and accommodation recommendations. Obviously this will bore most people stupid so stay away unless you’re planning a trip!

And Pub Trolls is the sort of ramblings we’ll subject all our friends to when we get back. This is for rants, travelling epiphanies, earnest learnings and silly stories. If you just read these you’ll probably have no idea of our route but you’ll know us quite well by the time you’ve finished!