Wild Journey - Afrika

DOCUMENTS AND PAPERS

Passport – must be valid for at least 6 months after your travels finish, for Africa it is recommended to have one with double the amount of pages (Africans just love their stamps, they want one free page per country). Just be careful, a lot of countries don’t like an Israeli stamp in your passport and won’t let you in (Egypt for example).


Vaccination pass – it is compulsory to have a vaccination against yellow fever to enter most African countries, so you MUST have one in your pass. This yellow international vaccination pass is available from every doctor, travel clinic etc. A yellow fever vaccination is a must, but other vaccinations are highly recommended as well. In our health section you will find lots of info on that!


Carnet de Passage – This is the “passport” for your car, allowing you to temporarily import and export your car in and out of the countries, in which you travel. If you don’t have it, you will pay customs tax, which can be very high! So having this carnet is a MUST! Not all African countries require one, like e.g. Ethiopia, but for others you need one. You usually get this from your national automobile club, you will have to pay a fee for the carnet (which is valid for 1 year) as well as a bond (a certain percentage of your car’s value) to make sure, you bring it back! In our example, as our car is registered in Czech Republic, we get ours from the Autotourist Prague for 2.500,- CZK (ca. 80 EUR) and have to pay a bond of ca 6000,- CZK (210 EUR).


COMESA Yellow card – This is an insurance for your car. Normally, your European insurer does not insure you for African countries, therefore mostly you buy your 3 party insurance for the amount of time you think to spend in the country at the border. In Middle, East and South Africa though it is worth buying this yellow COMESA card, which is an insurance for all the countries in this area. For us this is interesting, as we plan to go down the East coast. Just buy the card in the first country of this area, for example in Kenya on the way down. So you will not need to buy insurance each time you enter a country.


Inventory List of your car – This is worth doing to facilitate all the customs procedure, make a list of all your equipment on board and around the car. We have heard that it may help to have it in Arabic, as these countries tend to have quite a huge bureaucracy. In there, put your vehicle details as well, like chassis number etc.
(We actually never needed this one but again, maybe in a different situation it can help, better too much than not enough!)


International Driver’s License – This is required for driving in Africa and is only valid in connection with your “real” driver’s license, it expires after 3 years. You can get this from your local city council. Maybe try to get 2 – 3, just in case.


Trip Summary – Again, it can make things easier to have your travel plans, all your details and your planned route on a paper, best in connection with your inventory list. Call this all “trip summary” and try to have it not only in English, but in Arabic as well, it makes things easier for you! Don’t forget to put your passport details there as well, it’s best to have all of it together, border crossings should go a LOT smoother then!


Visas – We will try to get the first visas for our trip beforehand, like Tunisia, Libya and Egypt. The rest we will get on the way (hopefully!!!). For more information on the visas go to our travel diary, where we have all country information at the top of the page.


Copies – Take copies of ALL your documents and take about 24-30 passport photos for visa applications as it is impossible to get all the visa in advance, often you will get them in the country before, remember, you never know how much time you will definitely spend in one country. For the copies of passport and licenses, try to color-copy them and even laminate them, make them look official, just in case you have to leave them with an official and drive off.

ELECTRONICS

In our safe we have all our gadgets and toys, as a camera we use a Panasonic FZ50, a lot of SD cards, a small videocam with a few Mini DV's, laptop for the webpage, an external hard disk for all these nice pics, USB sticks, DVDs to burn, our satellite phone Motorola 9500, a Garmin GPS with tracks4africa maps, mobile phone, mp3 players and some transmitter radios...(yeah, sounds like a big safe!)