Afritrex - Route
Trip Tracker
Please click the link below to visit the Triptracker site to see where we've been!
The Afritrex Trip Tracker page
The Route
So where do you start? Lay out the maps; work out where we have to visit, then join the dots and draw a line from north to south and back again; then follow it. Easy…but this IS Africa, maybe it’ll take a little more than that!
Places we have to include - marathon locations, mountain locations, 75 VC sites, famous tourist sites, pick-up points for passengers, Cape Town
Places we have to avoid – closed borders, central Africa in the rainy season, the Sahara in the summer, political hotspots, mines
When you try and work out the logistics of what we’re trying to achieve you start to realise quite how crammed our year-long schedule is. Although we’re away for a year we’ve got a pretty full calendar that’s dictated by the dates of the marathons we’re entering; these are the dates we cannot miss! All others are guidelines.
From this we’ve drawn up a route which we know is achievable from watching other experiences on expedition websites, falls outside the impossible seasons of travel in Africa, passes around countries which are seriously dangerous to enter (they can be counted on one hand) and includes the many destinations we have chosen to explore.
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Our journey will leave at the end of 2007 from London, England to the whirr of film and the clicking of cameras as we satisfy the PR side of our departure, before heading down through mainland Europe in the middle of winter, stopping briefly in Spain to repack and restock, then take the short hop across the Straight of Gibraltar to our first African country of the trip, Morocco; the location for the first marathon and mountain challenge.
Once these are completed we head south hugging the Atlantic coast until Gambia, move inland to the heat of the Sahara and the travellers destination of Timbuktu, sweep around the vast Niger delta then head south towards Cape Town, taking in the second of our climbs en route if the warlords are kind to us. This is likely to be the more testing half of the expedition with roads less travelled and built, laws less observed and honoured, and repair shops few on the ground!
From Cape Town we follow the coast of South Africa for the two races at the halfway point of the trip, before heading due north for the first time in over six months towards Vic Falls and the next race on the schedule. The highlands of the Rift Valley become our bread and butter for the next few weeks as we attempt two more climbs then head back to the coastal path for a well-earned rest and recuperation session.
After taking in the vast reserves of Kenya and Tanzania and conquering Kilimanjaro we travel along the Rift Valley once more towards the Nile Delta and sweep west following the Mediterranean coast to Tunisia where our ferry to mainland Europe awaits.
Nothing is set in stone - everything can change and will as borders close and roads disappear – but we’ll try and keep as close to the planned route as possible.
View some key planning documents
Key marathon dates
Seasonal timings
African season and rainfall planner
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