End Of The Road

Jumping ahead a bit…

We rolled across the Ugandan border from Kenya 11 days ago, which means our Africa adventure is quickly coming to an end. Tomorrow, we’ll head down to Entebbe to catch a pre-dawn flight off the continent and back to DC via a short layover in Istanbul, where it all began in August.

Over 105 days, we covered more than 6,000 miles (10,000+ km) overland, from Cape Town, South Africa to Kampala, Uganda, with numerous side trips in between. With the exception of our short flights from Pemba, Mozambique to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and between Dar and Zanzibar, we covered the entire route by local bus, public mini bus taxi (chapa/ matatu/ dalladalla), in a rental car, private-hire taxi, by boat, canoe and on foot. When we started, we weren’t sure if the trip would take us through Namibia, Malawi, Zimbabwe or any number of other countries, but ended up traveling through six countries in Africa (South Africa, Lesotho, Mozambique, Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda), favoring a route that generally hugged the coast, with the major exceptions of the Drakensberg and Gauteng in South Africa and journeying inland into Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda over the final month of our 15 week journey.

A few of the highlights of our trip include roadtripping across South Africa, climbing Table Mountain in Cape Town, revisiting Linga Linga and my old stomping grounds in Mozambique, spending two weeks on the captivating island of Zanzibar, trekking through the mountains of rural northern Tanzania, visiting friends in Nairobi and Kampala and soaking up the beautiful beaches all along the Indian Ocean coastline.

As we’ve been traveling, we’ve also been keeping an up-to-date travel map tracking our progress. The map is interactive and includes our pitstops, in addition to a few of the highlights of the trip. Here’s the — more or less — final outcome:

I’ve got trip reports done for South Africa and Mozambique (including lodging, total costs/ budget and itinerary) with Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda and Turkey to come. And of course, I’m still catching up on a number of posts from our trip (and trips past), so you can look forward to those well into the holiday season!

In the meantime, if you haven’t already, you can get caught up on our Turkey, South Africa and Mozambique portions of the trip, starting from the beginning.