Our journey took the classic ‘Cairo - Cape Town’ east coast route. To get to Africa in the first place we took the slightly unusual ‘near East’ route: through France to the heal of Italy, crossed Greece, Turkey, Syria and Jordan before taking a short ferry ride into the Sinai peninsula of Egypt.
From Egypt we took the ferry across Lake Nasser to Sudan, where we drove through the desert and on into Ethiopia. Here we drove up into the highlands and passed the source of the Blue Nile then down the other side into the great rift valley and onwards to Kenya.
We then drove around the north of Lake Victoria into Uganda and on to the Volcano National Park on the Congolese / Rwandan border to see Gorillas (we were going to go into Rwanda but in the end ran out of time). We then retraced our steps back to Kenya and on into northern Tanzania where we were amazed by the Ngorongoro Crater.
After all this excitement we had a break (!) on Zanzibar before heading into Malawi. We passed through our trip namesake, Lilongwe, then into Zambia, across the Zambezi and into Botswana. We then got to marvel at the desert landscapes and rugged coast of Namibia before arriving in South Africa. After a lap of the country visiting friends and seeing the sights, including a brief excursion into Lesotho, we headed to our finish point in good old Cape Town.
19 countries, 18,000 miles, 5 months... It was quite some journey!
