Preparations

I had been saving for the downpayment for a flat for nearly two years, when I started getting increasingly anxious about actually buying one. I had just moved back from northern Finland, where I had been studying photography, to my parents house in southern Finland, where I was going to stay for the summer and buy a flat in the autumn. I wasn’t feeling comfortable with taking a huge loan, especially since I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do in the next few years, and having big loan payments to pay every month would not be helpful in saving money for traveling, which I had been missing a lot while I lived in London.

I think it was around July when I decided that I would take a break in saving for the flat, and instead save to go traveling. I was thinking about going to Spain for the winter, when I suddenly remembered a trip I had been dreaming to do years earlier, but always put off because the timing was never right. Overlanding in Africa.

I didn’t have any rent to pay, and my parents could take care of my dog while I was away, so it was the perfect opportunity to quickly save a lot of money and make the dream come true. It was time to start budgeting. I figured I could save about 1000€ every month. I compared different overlanding operators, and decided to go with Absolute Africa. I was also considering Oasis Overlanding as both of these companies had tons of experience and a budget that was right for me. The reason I chose AA was that they had front-facing seats on their trucks, which I figured would be much more comfortable than the ones on OO that were sideways. Small, but very important detail when you’ll be spending hours and hours on the truck each day for three months!

I had already decided years ago that I wanted to do the Nairobi-Cape Town tour. It was priced at £2670 including the optional Zanzibar stay, which had to be paid beforehand, plus 1260$ that would be paid in cash in Kenya. There was also a long list of optional activities listed, and after carefully considering what I would want to do, I calculated that I would need about 1000$ for these. It worked out quite cheap for me as I don’t really like any water sports as I can’t swim, and those were the most expensive things on the list. I’m quite happy with walks, village visits and sunset cruises!

About 300$ would be needed for visas. I booked flights from Helsinki to Nairobi through Doha with Qatar Airlines, those were about 600€.

Then there was the spending money. That was tricky, how could I know how much money I’ll be spending on lunches, souvenirs, internet connection and drinks? Absolute Africa has a helpful article on budgeting at the website, where it says that 1500$-1800$ should be enough. I decided to aim for 1500$ and if I managed more, great.

I would need to get yellow fever vaccination and malaria pills, they cost me about 150€. I already had traveler’s insurance, so I didn’t need to budget for that.

That was about it. Adding it all together I figured I needed roughly about 7500€. That meant I would need to save for about seven months. I then booked the trip to start in mid-January. In hindsight it would’ve been better to book it 2 or 3 weeks later, as I ended up spending a lot of money on things that I would need to take with me on the trip, including a last minute decision to buy a 700€ teleobjective for my camera. Got to get those close-ups of the elephants… I managed to meet my target, but I think I would’ve been much more comfortable to have some extra, just in case.

Well, there are always credit cards…

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Now that the financials had been sorted, I had to figure out what I would need to bring with me. After hours and hours of googling and reading packing lists on different overlanding operators websites I finally came up with a pretty comprehensive list. A lot of the things I already had, but a lot of things would still need to be bought. I ended up spending a lot more money than I had thought, as things like solar-charging powerbanks, head torches, first aid kits and medicines are not cheap. I ordered a lot stuff on the internet and picked up things from shops little by little.

I also had to get a new passport as mine was expiring – another 100€ expense. I had to book an appointment for getting the yellow fever vaccination and the prescription for malaria pills. I checked that my insurance was sufficient for the trip, read the 42 pages of the pre-departure pack over and over again to make sure I had done everything I needed to get ready, and counted down days for the big adventure. When I got my final paycheck before the trip there was just one final preparation to do, changing my €uros into dollar$.

This turned out to be more expensive than I had anticipated. The instructions were to bring most of the money in US dollars, as this was the preferred currency around Africa. Even though I pre-ordered most of my dollars online beforehand, which gave me a lot better excange rate, I still had to change some money at the shop as my last paycheck arrived just before the start of my trip. I bought a little over 3300$, which cost me about 3250€ when with the ”proper” rate I would’ve got about 3600$. Ouch!!! I would’ve saved about 100$ had I changed all the money beforehand rather than the last 1000$ at the airport, but unfortunately that was not an option.

That was it, everything was quite simple in the end, as the tour company gave very specific instructions, and were always happy to help if I had any questions.