The Pamir Highway (officially the M41) winds its way from Tajikistan to Kyrgyzstan through a region of soaring snowcapped mountains, rocky valleys, barren plateaus, and high-altitude passes. Climbing to its ultimate height at 4,655 metres, it’s the second-highest highway on earth. No wonder then, that the Pamirs are also called ‘The Roof of the World’.

Self-driving the Pamir Highway is definitely one of the world’s ultimate roadtrips. Thinking about taking it on? In this guide to the Pamir Highway I’ve outlined our eight day itinerary, and provided information to help you plan your own trip:

Transportation
Self-Driving the Pamir Highway
On the Road – Our Itinerary
Before You Go – Planning Your Trip
Osh, and Moving On

If you like roadtrips then this one has got it all. In case you’re wondering what you’ll find along the way, I’ve written another post about the very best of what we saw and did. Check it out here:
An Epic Roadtrip: Adventures on the Pamir Highway

Note: we did this trip in 2019 so costs as specified in this post will have gone up.

Transportation

There are a few different ways you can travel the Pamir Highway. Cycling is an ever-popular option (and I salute anyone who accomplishes this feat). Otherwise, the main options are:

• Car and Driver. This is the most popular way to go. You can book onto an organised tour (the most expensive option), or you can hire your own private car with a driver (so, essentially also a tour). You can do this alone or you can band together with other travellers you meet in Osh or Dushanbe. You are along for the ride and don’t need to worry about anything, although you can plan your stops and detours.
• Public Transport. The cheapest way to go is hitchhiking or public transport. This will take extra time waiting on rides and you can’t count on going exactly where you want or stopping whenever you want to take photos, hike, and so on, but it can certainly be done.
• Self-Driving. You can drive your own car or rent one without a driver. Self-driving costs a lot more than public transport but can cost slightly less than hiring a car with a driver. We opted to rent a car and self-drive because we knew it was the best way to get what we wanted from the trip: total independence, and being fully in charge of our own plans and pace.

Self-driving the Pamir Highway

Oyv and I are in no way strangers to long, agonizing trips on unreliable and sometimes downright dangerous public transport. In fact we relish it and very often set off to do exactly that – just have a look at the trips on this blog. We’ve taken on large swaths of Africa by public transport and that is no small feat. But in this case we decided to hire our own car and self-drive the Pamir Highway. That brought with it some different considerations, which is why I wrote this post.

If you decide to hire a car and self-drive the Pamir Highway, here are some things to think about:

• Finding a car. There are a few resources for car hire available. IndyGuide and Caravanistan list several agents who hire out cars in both Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. Expect to pay around 100-130 USD/day (plus fuel) for a reliable 4WD vehicle. We had a Toyota Forerunner which was perfect for the trip.
• Pick-up and Drop-off. The highway goes from Dushanbe to Osh (or vice versa) and unless you want to drive it twice you’re going to be picking the car up in one city (not to mention country) and dropping it off in the other. Most car providers handle this by charging a fee of around 150 USD to bring the car to your start point, or, to pick it up where you’ve left it.
• Collecting the car. Check it over really carefully in daylight, inside and out, before you sign off and pay up front. You’ll also need to fork over a deposit in cash, usually around 500 USD. Get familiar with all the documents in the glove compartment – these are permits and a passport for the car, which you’ll need at checkpoints and at the Tajikistan/Kyrgyzstan border when you take it across.
• Insurance. It’s not going to work the same way as it does in Europe (or whatever): for example, there’s no third-party insurance. So just don’t hit anyone.
• Kilometers. Our car had a 400 km/day limit which the owner said we could exceed without charge – but that exceeding it is extremely unlikely on these roads (and also unnecessary).
• Fuel. We topped up the tank whenever fuel was available and tried to stay as close to full as possible. It’s also more expensive the further you go so definitely fuel up in larger towns where possible.
• Road conditions and traffic. The roads vary constantly from muddy tracks, to once-paved roads crumbling into potholes, to smooth pavement, and so on, but are often a lot better than you think. Traffic isn’t really an issue: at this time of year, we could drive for hours without seeing another vehicle. You will meet convoys of big trucks, and you better hope there is room to pull over. In the Wakhan valley especially, there are a lot of animals and people on the roads to watch out for.
• Checkpoints. There seems to be a lot of talk about soldiers at checkpoints demanding bribes, especially from unaccompanied foreigners driving rental cars, but in our experience we didn’t have a single issue. No one ever demanded or even hinted for a bribe or tried to hold us back.
• Driving. Last but certainly not least, consider your driving skills. You’ll be driving on mountain roads, and probably off-roading too. Depending on the time of year, you may get almost anything weather-wise.

On the road: our itinerary

This post is about our experience self-driving the highway from Dushanbe to Osh in eight days, but you can certainly adapt any part of our itinerary to suit yourself with a car and driver or by public transport.

All the driving times here include a lot of stops to look around, take photos, walk, make coffee or eat lunch.

DAY 1 – Dushanbe to Kalai-Khum

Departed Dushanbe: 10.30 am
Arrived Kalai-Khum: 6 pm

It’s about 170 kilometers from Dushanbe to Kulob, where we filled up the tank. It’s then another 200 kilometers on to Kalai-Khum.

Driving in the Pamirs gives you a pretty unique view – right into Afghanistan. After Kulob, you can start peering across the Panj river and into Tajikistan’s infamous neighboring country. There are villages built into the hills on the Afghan side and you can see people going about their lives.

We stopped to make lunch near the first border bridge.

In Kalai-Khum we stayed at Darvoz guesthouse, which is actually just outside of town. We paid 30 USD for two for bed and breakfast. There is WiFi at the guesthouse and a restaurant just over the bridge in town called Oriyana, where we spent a grand total of 3 USD on dinner for two.

Roads: mostly good condition. Some potholes and broken asphalt right after Kulob for 15-20 kms, and it deteriorates again for the last 30 kms to Kalai-Khum. We passed two checkpoints with no issues, simply showed our passports and the car documents.

Time: 7.5 hours
Kilometers: 370
Cost for fuel, accommodation and meals for two: 55 USD

DAY 2 – Kalai-Khum to Khorog

Departed Kalai-Khum: 9 am
Arrived Khorog: 6 pm

This is where you’ll probably do the long-haul of the trip, Khorog being the unofficial ‘gateway’ to the highway. Before leaving Kalai-Khum we filled the tank again.

Khorog is either your first real sign of civilisation in days, or your last one (depending on whether you’re coming from Osh or from Dushanbe). If you’re just starting out, it’s your last chance to grab more cash or groceries.

Besides hotels, restaurants and other signs of life in Khorog, there’s also a Botanical Garden high up above the city with nice views, and a pretty bridge crossing the river in town. There are some parks and museums here too.

In Khorog we stayed at Riverside guesthouse, a very friendly and comfortable place with a kitchen where our own breakfast supplies came in handy. They have WiFi and we paid 17 USD for two (no meals). There’s an Indian restaurant in Khorog which I can’t really recommend for the food itself, but it’s cheap and handy – 11 USD for two curries, two rice, two sodas.

Roads: mostly bad and rough, deteriorated asphalt until the last 70kms into Khorog where it improved. Two checkpoints on the way.

Time: 9 hours
Kilometers: 240
Cost for fuel, accommodation and meals for two: 44 USD

DAY 3 – Khorog to Ishkashim

Departed Khorog: 11.45 am
Arrived Ishkashim: 5.30 pm

We filled up the tank again before leaving Khorog. Then we left the actual highway and drove into the Wakhan valley; this is the first, and major, detour on most Pamir trips. You can save a couple of days by remaining on the highway and bypassing the valley, but you’d be missing out on what is for most people (including us), a major highlight. Over the day we gradually climbed to an elevation of 2547 metres.

This was an awesome day, a very scenic route following the Afghan border, and filled with short detours off the road:

• Garam Chashma. Hotsprings that I’d recommend dropping. They’re very artificial.
• A steep (scary) hairpin road up to Dasht village. Stunning views over the valley.
• Out of nowhere the road turned into soft white sand along the river, so that’s where we stopped for our picnic lunch.
• Throughout the valley locals get around by hitchhiking. We picked up a lot of passengers, which was fun.

Reaching Ishkashim you pass a border bridge to Afghanistan. There’s a weekly market held in the no-man’s land here (I believe it’s on Saturday mornings – but we were not in town that day).

In Ishkashim we stayed at Ren guesthouse, which served by far the best food of the trip. It’s quite new and the room was really nice. We paid 30 USD for two people, for dinner, bed and breakfast.

Roads: OK off and on. Very narrow in places. Crumbling asphalt, sand, gravel, potholes. Two checkpoints.

Time: 5.5 hours
Kilometers (not including short detours): 105
Cost for fuel, accommodation and meals for two: 62 USD

DAY 4 – Ishkashim to Langar

Departed Ishkashim: 8.45 am
Arrived Langar: 6 pm

Like the first one, our second day in the Wakhan valley involved a lot of beautiful little sidetrips. All were marked on Maps.me and just a matter of turning off the road from time to time for short distances. Over the course of the day we reached an elevation of 2892 metres.

• We climbed up to the top of Khaaka Fortress.
• At Darshai Gorge we spent about two hours hiking a trail overlooking the gorge. With a guide from the village you can continue on a day or overnight hike to some valleys beyond.
• Maps.me showed ‘Emergency Shelters’ all over the route, so we checked one out. Not sure what they are for sheltering from, but if you need one, you can find one.
• An exciting drive up to Yamchun Fortress, creeping along hairpin turns right up to the ruins of this Silk Road fort.
• A short drive further on from the ruins we reached Bibi Fatima, hotsprings renowned for what else than healthful benefits. Entrance is 10 somoni (1 USD) per person. Leave your valuables in the car as you take nothing, and I mean nothing, no clothes allowed – into the springs with you. There are separate sections for men and women.
• We climbed up to a Buddhist stupa behind Vrang village. It’s easy to find but we were still escorted there by every kid in Vrang.
• We drove through another beautiful patch of sandy dunes on the way to Langar and stopped there for lunch and coffee.

In Langar we stayed at Nigina guesthouse which cost 30 USD for two for dinner, bed and breakfast.

Roads: in general OK – gravel, dirt, sand. One minor landslide blocked the road and held us back for few minutes, workers were already there clearing the rubble away. No checkpoints.

Time: 9 hours
Kilometers (not including short detours): 122
Cost for hotsprings, accommodation and meals for two: 32 USD

DAY 5 – Langar to Murgab

Departed Langar: 9 am
Arrived Murgab: 5.30 pm

We filled up the tank in at a gas station in Zong. And by ‘gas station’ I mean, a guy with a jerrycan and a big metal funnel. Fuel is noticeably more expensive out here than back in larger towns.

The 116 kilometers from Langar to Bulunkul took about 4 hours due to a blizzard on Khargush pass where you climb out of the Wakhan valley and back onto the Pamir Highway. There was a lot of snow accumulating on the ground, it was steep and slippery, and we could barely creep along at a snail’s pace. It was a scary drive (or fun, depending on which one of us you ask). There is a spectacular view of the Hindu Kush (Killer of Hindus) mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Once the skies cleared, we saw several camel caravans slowly plodding along on the Afghan side.

After that the road gradually veers away from the Afghan border. We took the cutoff to Bulunkul – the coldest town in the country – and stopped at the lake to look around at the yaks on the shore.

From Bulunkul to Murghab it’s another 145 kilometers. On the way we drove off-road to get a closer look at a beautiful green lake. We passed a couple of villages including Alichur; the scenery up here is ghostly and bare (you’re up around 4000 metres so no wonder), and there are some mountains with mineral layers.

In Murgab we slept at Sary Kol guesthouse, where the owner is really friendly and has put a lot of effort into his place. We paid 12 USD per person for bed and breakfast. We ate dinner at a hideous cafe in the shipping container bazaar.

Murgab is definitely worth a look around. It’s remote, desolate and the bazaar is made from shipping containers. The houses are low flat-roofed bungalows but you can see that people have been making efforts to brighten the place up. And of course, there’s a Lenin statue.

Roads: the M41 was surprisingly bumpy, full of potholes until about 30 kms out from Murgab. We averaged a speed of around 30-50 kph. There was a checkpoint on way over Khargush pass where we needed to leave copies of our passports and visas.

Time: 8.5 hours
Kilometers: 261
Cost for fuel, accommodation and meals for two: 49 USD

DAY 6 – Murgab to Karakul

Departed Murgab: 9.30 am
Arrived Karakul: 1 pm

We filled the tank in Murgab. Then we headed to Rangkul, another beautiful alpine lake about 35 kilometers off the highway. From there we carried on to Karakul over Ak-Baital pass, the highest pass in Tajikistan at 4655 meters.

After that the road trails a barbed wire fence marking the neutral zone between Tajikstan and China.There are tons of holes in this fence but to slip through one is not to visit China…just no-man’s land.

In Karakul we stayed at a homestay called Algerim, where we paid 10 USD each for dinner, bed and breakfast. We arrived early and used the time to relax in our big bright sunny room with lots of chai, next to a stove which our host continually filled with yak dung and stoked the fire. I had the best bucket shower of my life there (I’ve had a lot of bucket showers). The washroom is a little mud-walled stall in the backyard, with a tin pail of water simmering on a glowing stove. It’s toasty warm, despite being in the backyard of a house in Karakul.

Roads: there was a checkpoint on the way into Karakul.

Time: 3.5 hours
Kilometers: 136 km including Rangkul (100 km straight from Murgab to Karakul)
Cost for fuel, accommodation and meals for two: 60 USD

DAY 7 – Karakul to Sary-Mogol (Kyrgyzstan)

Departed Karakul: 9 am
Arrived Sary-Mogol: 3 pm

It’s only a one hour driver from Karakul to the border with Kyrgyzstan, where we stopped at the first post on the Tajik side for chai and paperwork. The guards were super friendly, they gave us candy…there was no talk of bribes. The second post is a few minutes further on, where you do papers again for customs, and they’ll take a cursory glance over the car. We spent about half an hour on the Tajik side (mostly listening to Afghan music and drinking chai with the guards).

It’s a 20 kilometer drive over Kyzyl-Art pass to the Kyrgyz side for another half hour processing immigration and customs. The guards were friendly, and jokey – ‘Any drugs, bombs?’ and ‘Why not?’ were their two questions to us.

Driving over the pass we noticed countless cute gophers standing up on top of their little hills. We drove straight on to Sary-Tash and from there on to Sary-Mogul.

We stayed in Sary-Mogol at a CBT guesthouse where we paid 1300 Krygyz Som (18 USD) per person for dinner, bed and breakfast. Food improved pretty drastically at this point, but that is not saying much. The guesthouse also had WiFi.

Roads: Kyzyl-Art pass was snowy and muddy but easy fun driving.

Time: 6 hours
Kilometers: 125
Cost for accommodation and meals for two: 38 USD

DAY 8 – Sary-Mogol to Osh

Departed Sary-Mogol: 1 pm
Arrived Osh: 4 pm

We filled up the tank twice, once in Sary-Tash and again in Osh.

After breakfast we drove 21 kilometers out of town towards Peak Lenin until we hit deep snow and left the car. From there we walked another 3 kilometers to Tolpur-kul (a lake).

In summer you can drive whole way, but it makes a nice hike with great views. In the distance you can see Peak Lenin peeking out of the clouds. From this point it’s another few hours trekking to the first base camp.

After the hike we returned to the car and drove the last three hours of the trip, to Osh.

Roads: all good, beautiful views of green and red mountains – and a rockslide on the way to Osh.

Time: 3 hours driving
Kilometers: 219
Cost for fuel: 45 USD

Before you go – planning your trip

There’s no need to nail it all down. A trip like this is a ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’. The highway itself is approximately 1250 kilometers but you’ll probably add onto that with detours. There are many of these, the most famous one being the Wakhan Valley. Depending on the time frame you are working with you should read up on your options in advance and at least have a rough idea of what you’d most like to see or do.

When to Go
Where to Start and End
How Many Days
Things to Bring
Sleeping
Costs and Money
Keeping in Touch

When to go

We picked early spring (the very end of April) and without any other seasons to compare to, I would still say that that was the best time for us. The weather can be unstable and certain areas can be off-limits due to snow. But for the most part we had sun and the major advantage over summer is that there were no crowds: no advance bookings needed, and we usually had the road and sights along the way entirely to ourselves.

Where to start and end

You can start in Osh (Kyrgyzstan) and end in Dushanbe (Tajikistan), or vice versa. Starting in Osh means that on the very first or second day, you’ll quickly ascend to over 4000 metres without almost any time to acclimatise and that can affect some people badly. There is also a lot of debate over in which direction the views are ‘best’ but it seems pretty evenly split and honestly, you can always just look behind you the way you came. For us starting in Dushanbe made the most sense, in connection with the rest of our travel plans in Central Asia both before and after the roadtrip.

How many days

It’s best not to rush or take on too much. It’s also a good idea to expect the unexpected. Especially in the spring time, weather can easily throw a wrench in the best-laid plans. On our way into Dushanbe from Penjikent a rockslide closed the road and held our share-taxi and all the other traffic up for 5 hours. It wasn’t a problem and the best part was that our car wasn’t actually under the rockslide. Plus, you never know when you may want to stop and linger somewhere amazing (or leave some place you aren’t so keen on).

Eight days was a very comfortable amount of time to do what we wanted without feeling rushed at all.

Things to bring

• Visa, Permit. Getting an eVisa online is fast and painless. The part of Tajikistan you’ll travel through is called Gorno-Badakhshan, and it’s a separate region with its own entry requirements. You’ll need a GBAO permit, and it’s very easy to get – just flag the box on the eVisa application. The two together cost 70 USD. Print the visa out and bring it.
• Cash. Between Khorog and Sary-Tash there are no ATMs. Bring some USD with you to Tajikistan as even in Dushanbe you may not want to count entirely on ATMs. Before leaving Dushanbe we changed most of our USD to Tajik somoni, as the rate in the mountains is terrible. We paid for everything – except the car – using somoni and kept a couple hundred dollars as an emergency stash.
• Documents. Bring a few photocopies of your passport photo page and your printed visa/permit. At some checkpoints you will need to provide the guards with these copies.
• Maps.me is pretty indispensable. In addition to the actual route a lot of detours, stops and homestays are marked on it as well.
• Powerbanks. You’ll probably be able to charge your devices via a usb in the car, and at night at your homestay, but a powerbank or two is a good idea.
• Music. We obviously had music on our phones, and also brought a speaker. We’re still haunted by the time we spent a week driving around the Australian outback and only had a CD of Sumatran gong-music we’d picked up in Indonesia on the way.
• Flashlight. For night time bathroom trips, if nothing else. Which reminds me: toilet paper.
• Thermos, cups, spoons. Every morning we asked our homestay to fill our thermoses with boiling water, and we made coffee and soup on the way. Our car also had a gas bottle and burner on board (and a tent and sleeping bags too).
• Food and water. We brought all our water with us. We also brought lunch-type food and snacks for the road. Before setting off, we grocery shopped at the Auchan in Dushanbe which is a pretty good supermarket. Most days we ate lunch picnicking in the wild and it was not only really nice, but also convenient. Honestly eating at homestays for dinner and breakfast is enough greasy eggs, fried potatoes and tough meat as it is, without stopping for more of it at lunch as well.

Sleeping

Other than camping accommodation is mainly in the form of homestays which are everywhere. They are pretty basic but absolutely do the trick and are certainly an authentic way to experience life in the Pamirs. In some cases owners have really made obvious efforts to create a little travellers’ oasis – others are more like, ‘here is some space where you can sleep’. They have shared and private rooms, some with beds and in others you sleep on mattresses on the floor. The (flushing) toilets are often outside (sooo cold at night!). A night at a homestay typically costs 10-15 USD per person and includes dinner, bed and breakfast.

We didn’t book a single night in advance. On www.pamirtop.com you can find and book homestays and www.visitpamirs.com gives some in-depth information about homestays.

Costs and money

Your daily budget will need to include fuel, accommodation and meals on the road. For example, we spent:

• 38 USD at a supermarket before leaving. This worked out to about the right amount of food and water (and some vodka).
• a total of 173 USD on fuel, including a final top-up before returning the car.
• between 10-15 USD per person per day for dinner/bed/breakfast at a homestay.

In total we spent about 385 USD on the road, or 48 USD per day for two.

Add to that a car costing approximately 100-130 USD per day, and 150 USD for the pick-up/drop-off fee, and you’re looking at around 1,335 USD to 1,575 USD for an eight day self-driving trip (for two people).

IMPORTANT – remember to bring all the cash you will need for your daily expenses. There may be an ATM in Murghab, I’m not sure, but other than that there are none between Khorog and Sary-Tash. We actually brought way too much cash with us on the road; 4000 somoni for the eight days would have comfortably covered us both with some left over.

Keeping in touch

• WiFi. Don’t expect to be posting your entire trip. You probably won’t get online (unless you’ve got data, and maybe not even then) in between Khorog and Sary-Tash.
• Phones. We didn’t buy a local SIM and didn’t need one either. We did have signal on our phones on the road from time to time and every night in town.
• Other drivers. We knew of two or three other cars with hired drivers who were taking groups on the road at the same time as we were on it. We ran into them from time to time and could check in with the drivers, ask about the road ahead, and so on. Actually two of these local drivers complimented Oyv’s driving and this spurred him on to new heights of confidence and speed, so I was mostly sorry we’d met them…

Osh, and moving on

After our walk in the foothills below Peak Lenin we drove the last scenic, mountainous stretch of the Pamir Highway to its very end in Osh, Kyrgyzstan.

Ironically, after navigating all those steep, twisting, crumbling mountain roads (not to mention a high-altitude blizzard) Oyv found driving through Osh was the worst part, driving-wise, of the whole trip. Osh is a little chaotic and messy, especially if you arrive at rush hour after eight days in the Pamirs, where sharing the road with two other cars feels like a bit of a traffic jam.

‘It’ll be nice to get to Osh and eat some…shashlik?’ we’d said to each other one night on the road over yet another dinner of leathery meat and potatoes, with stale bread and damp cookies. So we went straight to Brio, a cafe in Osh that does good coffee and cake (and no shashlik, thankfully). It was hot and sunny and we were feeling pretty great. The trip was fantastic and we lingered over our coffees with a sense of accomplishment, thinking over everything we’d just seen and done.

Early the next morning we were off, again – heading back to Almaty, Kazakhstan. From Almaty Oyv was heading home but I had some more things to do in Kazakhstan.

Read More

Check out the rest of my stories from the road, for more of my adventures (and misadventures) in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan.

The post Self-driving the Pamir Highway: planning eight days on the ‘Roof of the World’ appeared first on WhirledAway.

A self-driving safari in southern Africa is definitely one of the world’s ultimate roadtrips. Thinking about taking it on? In this post I’ve outlined our twenty-one day self-driving itinerary, and provided some information to help you plan your own ultimate African roadtrip:

Self-driving
On the road: our itinerary
Before you go: planning your trip
Maun, and moving on

In case you’re wondering what you’ll find along the way, I’ve written another post about the very best of what we saw and did. Check it out here: Home is where the car is: a roadtrip in southern Africa.

Self-driving

We’ve taken on large swaths of Africa by public transport and that is no small feat – just have a look at the trips on this blog. But we decided to hire our own car and self-drive in southern Africa. The route we planned would have been impossible with public transport. You can’t get properly into the parks, distances are vast, buses only run between bigger cities, etc. On the limited public transport options available you’d miss out on the experiences that truly make this trip incredible.

Also keep in mind, that when you drive yourself on a trip like this (assuming there are two of you): one person is driving and the other is the animal spotter and photographer. Actually, both of you should be keeping an eagle-eye out for animals bounding around into the road. We’ve safaried by now in pretty much every category possible, and definitely the upside to going with a guide is that you have someone who knows where to look for the animals, and can answer all your questions. An sometimes they’ll even make you sundowners on the savannah.

Self-driving is the most expensive way to get around but you have all the freedom to plan the route yourself. If you decide to hire a car and self-drive southern Africa, here are some things to think about:

• Finding a car. There are a many resources for car hire available. Google is your friend:) We shopped around and chose the quote from DriveSouthAfrica. The price will vary depending on the season. Although you can do parts of this trip with a regular 2WD, you’re much better off hiring a 4WD. A lot of areas will otherwise be inaccessible to you, especially in Botswana.
• Pick-up and drop-off. You can start and end your trip in two different cities or even in two different countries. We picked up in Johannesburg (South Africa) and dropped off in Maun (Botswana). This worked really well for us, and it’s one of the reasons you’ll want to plan your route before finalizing the car.
• Collecting the car. Check it over really carefully in daylight, inside and out, before you sign off and pay up front. Get familiar with all the documents in the glove compartment – these are permits and a passport for the car, which you’ll need at checkpoints and at the borders when you take it across.
• Insurance. The car company should cover all cost up to a deductible as long as you don’t get stuck in the sand on the beach in Namibia as the tide comes in, or hit an elephant (or almost any large animal).
• Kilometers. The distances especially in Namibia are humongous so make sure you have unlimited kilometers.
• Fuel. We topped up the tank whenever fuel was available and tried to stay as close to full as possible.
• Road conditions and traffic (animals). The roads vary constantly from different depths of sand, to loose gravel, to smooth pavement, and so on, but are often a lot better than you think. Traffic isn’t really an issue other than driving in/out of the big cities. We could drive for hours without seeing another vehicle in Namibia. In some places more than others, you really need to keep your eyes peeled for animals. Don’t drive at night.
• Security. Crime is an issue in South Africa, not only in Johannesburg and Cape Town. It is important to be vigilant when stopping at gas stations and grocery shops. Keep your doors locked when driving. Namibia and Botswana are much safer, but even there we had more than one person warn us to be careful, watch out, etc.
• Driving. Last but certainly not least, consider your driving skills. You’ll be driving on sandy roads especially in Botswana’s national parks, and probably off-roading too. Depending on the time of year, you may get all sorts of weather.
• Food. You can’t bring uncooked meat over the borders.
• The Maps.me app has the best off-road maps. We were told by locals to use Maps.me not Tracks 4 Africa.

On the road: our itinerary

This post is about our experience roadtripping from Johannesburg to Maun in three weeks, but you can certainly adapt any part of our itinerary to suit yourself. We’re just trying to help you get started:)

DAY 1 – Johannesburg to Kuruman (South Africa)
DAY 2 – Kuruman to Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park
DAY 3 – Transfrontier Park – Twee Rivieren camp to Mata-Mata camp
DAY 4 – Transfrontier Park (Mata Mata camp) to Aus (Namibia)
DAY 5 – Aus to Sesriem (detour to Luderitz/Kolmanskop)
DAY 6 – Sesriem (daytrip to Soussusvlei/Deadvlei)
DAY 7 – Sesriem to Swakopmund
DAY 8 – Swakopmund (rest day)
DAY 9 – Swakopmund to Brandberg (detour to Cape Cross)
DAY 10 – Brandberg to Etosha National Park
DAY 11 – Etosha National Park
DAY 12 – Etosha National Park
DAY 13 – Etosha National Park to Caprivi Strip
DAY 14 – Caprivi Strip (rest day)
DAY 15 – Caprivi Strip to Kavimba (Botswana. Detour to Kasane)
DAY 16 – Chobe National Park – Riverfront
DAY 17 – Kavimba to Chobe National Park
DAY 18 – Chobe National Park – Linyanti
DAY 19 – Chobe National Park – Linyanti to Khwai
DAY 20 – Khwai
DAY 21 – Khwai to Maun

All the driving times here include our stops to grocery shop, look around, take photos, walk, sight-see, make coffee, or eat lunch.

DAY 1 – Johannesburg to Kuruman (South Africa)

Departed Johannesburg: 11 am
Arrived Kuruman: 6 pm

It’s about 530 kilometers from Johannesburg to Kuruman. The drive is mostly highway and sometimes country roads through flat farmland. Since we had done most of our grocery shopping before we picked the car up, we only had to grab a few of the fresh items in Kuruman. We didn’t want to overstock on meat, since in a couple of days we’d be crossing a border and it could be confiscated.

Roads: sealed, in good condition.

Time: 7.5 hours
Kilometers: 530
Accommodation: powered campsite at Red Sands Country Lodge

DAY 2 – Kuruman to Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park

Departed Red Sands Country Lodge: 9 am
Arrived Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park, Twee Rivieren campground: 4 pm

This stretch was mainly just a driving day to reach the park. There is nothing much to see but we made a nice lunch stop in Askham at the Diamond T Coffee Shop.

We had planned to spend only one night in the Transfrontier park before crossing the border to Namibia. However, at the park office we learned that it’s mandatory to stay at least two nights if you want to exit South Africa from the border post inside the park. So at this point we booked the next night at Mata Mata campsite, which is inside the park and next to the Namibian border post.

We had originally booked the next night at Quiver Tree Forest Camp in Namibia, so we had to cancel that.

Roads: sealed, in good condition. After entering the park the road became sandy but not deep sand.

Time: 7 hours
Kilometers: 515
Accommodation: powered campsite at Twee Rivieren campground

DAY 3 – Transfrontier Park – Twee Rivieren camp to Mata Mata camp

Departed Twee Rivieren: 8 am
Arrived Mata Mata: 2 pm

First things first. There is a petrol station at the Twee Rivieren campground where you can deflate your tires before driving on the sandy park roads. Ask the staff about upcoming road conditions and adjust the tire pressure accordingly. We learned this the hard way. We got a flat tire on the way from Aus to Sesriem due to not setting the pressure correctly.

We spent the day game-driving slowly towards Mata Mata. The landscape is unique and beautiful.

Roads: light sandy roads at this time of year.

Time: 5.5 hours
Kilometers (not including short detours): 105
Accommodation: powered campsite at Mata Mata camp

DAY 4 – Transfrontier Park (Mata Mata camp) to Aus (Namibia)

Departed Mata Mata camp: 8 am
Arrived Aus: 4 pm

The border crossing inside the park is pretty straightforward. You’ll pay a small fee for road tax. The drive on the Namibian side towards Aus is on ever-changing and beautiful hilly red roads until Keetmanskop. Just before Keetmanskop is the Quiver Tree Forest which you can stop off at to take a look.

Roads: gravel from the border to Keetmanskop. The rest of the way to Aus is asphalt.

Time: 8 hours
Kilometers (not including detours): 475
Accommodation: powered campsite at Klein Aus Vista

DAY 5 – Aus to Sesriem (detour to Luderitz/Kolmanskop)

Departed Aus: 7 am
Arrived Sesriem: 5.30 pm

We set off early in the morning to have a coffee in Luderitz, about an hour away. There are a few good cafes in Luderitz – we picked the Desert Deli. We went to Luderitz in the first place to check out Kolmanskop, the mining ‘ghost town’ nearby. Check the tour times in advance, you can go in by yourself but the tour is good. You can pay for it online or at the gate – bring cash, paying by card is unreliable.

Can’t stress this enough – check and adjust your tire pressure before driving on to Sesriem. We didn’t and ended up with a flat right before Helmingerhausen. Helmeringhusen on the other hand does have a nice cafe and very helpful staff at a garage.

Roads: sealed from Aus to Luderitz. From Aus to Sesriem is gravel but in pretty good condition.

Time: 10.5 hours
Kilometers: 636 km
Accommodation: powered campsite at Little Soussus Lodge

DAY 6 – Sesriem (daytrip to Soussusvlei/Deadvlei)

Departed campsite: 8 am
Arrived campsite: 4 pm

Little Sossus Lodge is a great spot to camp. Each site has sheltered parking for the car and a little kitchen and bathroom setup.

There will be a queue at the Sesriem gate in the morning. Try to be early, and remember sunscreen (we did not and had to buy some at the garage in Sesriem, you need it). You will get a permit at the park gate. You can pay the ticket when you leave the park, to save time and beat the crowds.

Again: ask at your accommodation or a service station about road conditions on the way to and around Sossusvlei and Deadvlei. Adjust your tire pressure. Once you’re inside the gate drive to the end of the sand river. There’s a car park where you can leave the car to explore Deadvlei (1 on map below). You can climb up (and run down) various huge dunes, and of course see the famous petrified camelthorn trees in Deadvlei. There are also plenty of areas you can set up in the shade and cook or have a picnic at Sossusvlei (2).  We climbed Dune 45 (3).

Don’t get stuck!! If you’re not driving a 4×4 you can leave your car in the car park and get a ride out to the dunes on a wagon pulled by the tractor. Our campground gave us this map, they also advised us about driving conditions, and so on:

Roads: sealed until you get to the sand river. Keep up your speed in the sand, never stop or you’ll get stuck.

Time: 8 hours
Kilometers: 220
Accommodation: powered campsite at Little Sossus Lodge

DAY 7 – Sesriem to Swakopmund

Departed Sesriem: 8 am
Arrived Swakopmund: 2 pm

The landscape changes constantly which makes for an interesting drive. Like literally every single other person there, we stopped at McGregor’s Bakery in Solitare, for their ‘famous apple pie’. It’s ok, but for us the point of the stop was just that we needed lunch.

After Solitare we made a left towards Swakopmund. On the way you’ll pass the sign for the Tropic of Capricorn. After the sign we carried on through Gaub Pass, and the landscape changed again.

There are tons of places to stay in Swakopmund but we opted to stay at a campground just bit removed from the city. No big deal when you’ve got your own wheels anyway.

Roads: unsealed until just outside Swakopmund, but pretty good.

Time: 6 hours
Kilometers: 350
Accommodation: powered campsite at Sophia Dale Base Camp

DAY 8 – Swakopmund (rest day)

After seven days of braaing and cooking we decided to just chill in the cafes and restaurants in Swakopmund. We sampled the German cooking at Swakopmund Brauhouse, and there’s excellent pizza at Gabriele’s Italian Pizzeria.

Accommodation: powered campsite at Sophia Dale Base Camp

DAY 9 – Swakopmund to Brandberg (detour to Cape Cross)

Departed Swakopmund: 8 am
Arrived Brandberg: 3 pm

On way up the coast to Cape Cross we were hoping to see some old shipwrecks but the fog was too thick that morning. The drive to the Cape Cross Seal Colony took around 1.5 hours. It’s a great but fairly smelly expreience – definitely worth a short detour. After the colony we backtracked to the T-junction right before Hentiesbaai and headed towards the Brandberg mountains.

We absolutely loved our campsite at the White Lady Lodge in Brandberg. If you’re lucky you might get elephants walking right through your campsite. The lodge has a pool which campers can also use.

Roads: unsealed until sometime after the T-junction in Hentiesbaai. It was under improvements at the time.

Time: 7 hours
Kilometers: 330
Accommodation: unpowered campsite at Brandberg White Lady Lodge

DAY 10 – Brandberg to Etosha National Park

Departed Brandberg: 9 am
Arrived Etosha Trading Post: 4 pm

This day was mostly just a driving day to reach Etosha National Park. We stopped in Outjo we stocked up on fuel, groceries, and wine. You can buy stuff in Etosha but everything is more expensive and grocery selection is more limited.

We decided to stay just outside the park on the first night, at Etosha Trading Post campground. That was a great decision since the campsite at Okaukuejo is very busy and crowded. The Trading Post is right next to the park has waterhole which is lit up at night. It’s small and the sites are awesome – besides the usual braai and tap you get a little kitchen area and your own open-air bathroom.

Roads: unsealed until Khorixas. The rest of the way to Etosha is sealed.

Time: 7 hours
Kilometers: 350
Accommodation: powered campsite at Etosha Trading Post

DAY 11 – Etosha National Park

We entered the park at Andersson gate and went straight to the main office there to pay park fees and sort out the campsites. Then we headed out for some game-driving.

We spent one night at Okaukuejo camp. It’s the biggest one and has a distinct parking-lot feel to it. It’s busy and ugly and has an extremely non-atmospheric restaurant. But, they have a big waterhole which is floodlit at night and this was busy with elephants and rhinos and made the stay worthwhile. I’d actually recommend it just for the waterhole. It’s convenient as well since it’s just inside the gate but otherwise if you’re exploring that side of the park I’d stay outside, at Etosha Trading Post for example.

Roads: unsealed but in good condition when we were there in the dry season.

Accommodation: powered campsite at Okaukuejo camp

DAY 12 – Etosha National Park

Departed Okaukuejo camp: 8 am
Arrived Namutomi camp: 1 pm

We made our way slowly game-driving from Okaukuejo camp to Namutoni camp. Namutoni is a more peaceful and less crowded and much better than Okaukuejo. They also have a waterhole but it was not as busy as Okaukuejo.

Roads: unsealed but in good condition when we were there in the dry season.

Time: depends on game-driving
Kilometers: 135
Accommodation: powered campsite at Namutoni camp

DAY 13 – Etosha National Park to Caprivi Strip

Departed Namutoni camp: 8 am
Arrived Caprivi Strip: 4-5 pm

We exited the park at Von Lindequist gate. This was mainly a driving day with nothing particular to see or do along the way – just enjoying the road and listening to audio books. We made stops for groceries and petrol in Grootfontein. Again, we were careful not to overstock meat since we had the border crossing to Botswana coming up soon and meat can be confiscated.

Roads: sealed and in good condition. The 3 km from the main road to Ngepi campsite is a sand track, but it is possible to drive there in a 2WD.

Time: 8-9 hours
Kilometers: 640
Accommodation: powered site at Ngepi camp

DAY 14 – Caprivi Strip (rest day)

Ngepi campground along the Okavanga river is beautiful and peaceful. Sites are big and private with lots of shade, strung out along a dirt road. You can see wildlife on the other side of the river, elephants, rhinos, warthogs, buffalo and so on. We just hung out there for a day enjoying the peace and quiet. They have a nice lodge area too if you don’t want to cook and – they have a wood fired bath on a little platform overlooking the river. Especially if you haven’t had one recently – take a bath!

Roads: sand track from Ngepi campground to the main road.

Accommodation: powered campsite at Ngepi campground

DAY 15 – Caprivi Strip to Kavimba (Botswana. Detour to Kasane)

Departed Caprivi Strip: 9 am
Arrived Kavimba: 2 pm

To be on the safe side we wanted to carry a satellite phone with us in the Chobe/Okavanga area. Up until Botswana we weren’t worried about getting stranded roadside or stuck in the sand, but in Chobe/Okavanga you can drive into pretty isolated and remote areas, and on deep sand roads that could be difficult to handle the car on, especially depending on your level of expertise. Theoretically, in low season a few days could go by before you see another vehicle. So, we reserved a phone in advance with a Sat4Rent company (the place we hired the car from recommended them) and arranged to pick it up in Kasane. There was really no other reason to go to Kasane at this point besides picking up a phone, getting cash, or stocking up on groceries.

The border crossing between Namibia and Botswana is straightforward. On the Namibian side we showed the car papers and stamped out. Then we drove across the bridge over the Okavanga river and got our first glimpse of why Botswana is such an amazing safari destination…there are animals everywhere along the river. Before driving up the small hill on the Botswanian side, we drove through a shallow pool of disinfectant – there’s hoof and mouth in Namibia yet somehow they are keeping it out of Botswana. Before we got our Botswana entry stamps we also had to step into some disinfectant to clean our shoes.

Roads: sealed, in good condition

Time: 5 hours
Kilometers: 285 (detour to Kasane)
Accommodation: powered campsite at Mwandi View camp

DAY 16 – Chobe National Park – Riverfront

If you’re planning your trip early enough and can get into the Chobe Riverfront – Ihaha campsite, definitely do that. We ‘only’ booked 4-5 months in advance, and even then pickings were slim for campsites in Chobe and Okavanga – meaning we had to find alternate camps and in some cases juggle days around or change the itinerary to work with what was still available.

In Kavimba we stayed at Mwandi View, which has a pretty view over the Cuando river and its own waterhole. The owner there is really knowledgeable and very helpful with planning our game-drives. He pointed out that it’s better to enter the Riverfront from the northern end than from the very busy southern end near Kasane. Coming from Kasane you get all the crowds of daytrippers from both Kasane and Zambia.

Staying at Mwandi View, we went for both morning and evening drives on the Chobe Riverfront.

Roads: sand and dirt, in pretty good condition in Chobe Riverfront

Time: depends on game-driving
Accommodation: powered campsite at Mwandi View camp

DAY 17 – Kavimba to Chobe National Park

Departed Kavimba: 8 am
Arrived Linyanti: 11 am

After some more useful information from our host regarding the road ahead, we set off to tackle the sand tracks to Linyanti camp in Chobe. In August the road was very sandy and we kept up a good pace to avoid getting stuck. Often the sand was so deep that we could feel the traction underneath the car and thought we were stuck for sure, but it never happened!

Eventually we reached the Linyanti gate where we paid our park fees (we’d already paid for the campsite).

Originally we’d wanted to break up the drive by spending a night in Savuti campsite, which is about halfway to our next campsite at Khwai. Savuti was fully booked so we took two nights at Linyanti instead, and did not regret it. It was amazing. Our site was right on a marshy riverbank and there were herds of elephants all around.

Roads: deep sand after Kavimba town.

Time: 2.5-3 hours
Kilometers: 95
Accommodation: unpowered campsite at Linyanti camp

DAY 18 – Chobe National Park – Linyanti

We absolutely loved our time at Linyanti. We spent the morning and evening game driving, but the main draw for this camp was the elephants along the riverfront right next to our site. We mainly spent two days watching the elephants roaming right past us to and from the water. And we woke up one night to an elephant snacking on a tree next to our car.

Roads: sandy (but not very deep sand) inside Linyanti gate.

Accommodation: unpowered campsite at Linyanti camp

DAY 19 – Chobe National Park – Linyanti to Khwai

Departed Linayanti: 7.30 am
Arrived Khwai: 3 pm

We were a bit worried about this day since it was a long drive though deep sand, but it went better than we thought. We’d been warned numerous times not to drive the direct route from Linyanti to Savuti which is mapped on Maps.me, but instead to go back the way we came and continue from there to Ghoha gate. The road was deep sand all the way to Ghoha gate in August, but after Ghoha gate it was pretty smooth sailing to Savuti. After Savuti we followed directions to go left at Elephant rock heading towards Mababe gate, for a better chance of seeing animals.

Roads: deep sand from Linyanti until Ghoha gate. Less deep sand until Savuti. Fairly good dirt tracks until Mababe gate. Even better road from Mababe gate to Khwai Development Trust.

Time: 6-7 hours
Kilometers: 160
Accommodation: unpowered campsite at Magotho camp (Khwai Development Trust)

DAY 20 – Khwai

Another awesome campsite. We got a secluded site right next to the river. There is an extensive network of game driving roads around the campground. We went for morning and evening drives both mostly just enjoyed hanging around our campsite.

Another bonus to staying at Magotho is that the campground fee is lower than the governmental campgrounds inside the National Park. And, you really don’t even need to go into the park either to game drive, so no park fees then either:)

Roads: dirt track and some sandy roads.

Accommodation: unpowered campsite at Magotho camp (Khwai Development Trust)

DAY 21 – Khwai to Maun

Departed Khwai: 10 am
Arrived Maun: 2-3 pm

On our last day we went for a final nostalgic game drive and then headed to Maun. It was dirt road all the way to Mawana checkpoint. There we went through another round of tire and shoe disinfecting. The rest of the way to Maun is smoothsailing.

Roads: dirt track and sealed roads

Time: 4-5 hours
Kilometers: 140

Before you go: planning your trip

I hate to even say this, but start planning early! Especially if you’re going in the high season (June to September). We started planning 5-6 months ahead, which is extremely early for us but in fact on the late side. Campgrounds book out, in particular the government campgrounds in Botswana’s Chobe and Moremi/Okavanga Delta. We had to tweak our route a bit to work around campground availability. You have to contact the campgrounds, check availability, and plan your whole itinerary. Rental cars will also book out especially in high season.

When to go

Botswana’s dry season largely overlaps Namibia’s, with May through to October being the best time for wildlife spotting in Botswana and also the best time to travel in the Okavanga Delta.

We planned our trip to run from mid August into early September. It’s high season from June to September, which meant that campground rates were a bit higher and the car cost more. That’s winter time, too, and we thought the weather was just about perfect. It was always sunny with comfortable daytime temperatures. It definitely got chilly at night and in the early morning so bring some warm clothes to layer-up. We asked for an extra blanket for the rooftent and we slept perfectly.

Where to start and end

You’d probably start your trip in Windhoek, Johannesburg, Cape Town, Gaborone, or Maun/Kasane (Botswana). We decided to start in Johannesburg.

In the planning stage we debated if we should head from Johannesburg to Maun (Botswana) first and then to Namibia, or vice versa. Since we were travelling onwards to Zambia after the roadtrip, and also wanted the wildlife in Botswana as a highlight at the end, we decided to go west, to Namibia first. So, we went through the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park to Namibia, and ended the trip in Maun.

For us, this was the right choice. It gave us a chance to get familiar with the car and handling it in different road conditions before really going into the bush in Botswana. We also liked the progression from Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park to Etosha National Park to the absolute safari dream highlight, Chobe (really any part of Botswana fits into the safari dream category).

How many days

We wanted to see most of the highlights in Namibia and Botswana. We also wanted some chill days after lengthy drives and to stay extra days in the parks to get the most out of our game driving. We landed on twenty-one days and it felt like a good amount of time to do what we wanted to do without rushing around.

Two nights in both Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park and Etosha was enough. We’d have spent more time in and around Chobe if more campgrounds had availability.

Camping

We hired a 4×4 with a roof tent. Super comfortable, and took literally minutes to set up or pack up camp. You could also just bring a tent and set up camp on the ground too.

We hired a car that came equipped with everything we needed for cooking, kitchen sink included. We kept the water tank on the car filled and carried charcoal for braaing as well as a gas bottle for the stove. We’re coffee lovers so our Aeropress comes with us everywhere we go. No nescafe here, thanks. We also had our manual water filter with us, plus our Crazy Cap UV filter.

We are also food-and-cooking-lovers, so we planned meals for three to four days and went grocery shopping in the bigger towns. If you’re a meat lover southern Africa is your kind of place.

When it comes to camping on this trip, we were spoiled for choice. You can have it as rough and rustic or as comfy and chill as you like. We tried all sorts of sites, from isolated no-frills bush camping to tidy little camps with open-air kitchens and showers. Sometimes there was a fence between us and the unknown, and other times…not so much. Keep in mind that at unfenced sites, you won’t be able to leave your camp after night – so go to the ablutions block before dark!

We often took powered sites with electricity but you don’t have to. If you’re going to drive all day then plugging in the car isn’t such a huge concern but in cases where we planned to chill out in the campsite we needed to keep an eye on the car battery. Many sites will have a braai – bring charcoal. Those sites will often have a tap in the site or nearby for washing water as well. Our sites in Linyanti and Khwai had nothing – we bought firewood and had our own grill etc to put on top.

It depends what you like but trying a mix of sites with different amenities (or none at all) worked really well for us.

It can be a bit tricky to book campsites, especially in Botswana. Some campgrounds are run by private operators, some by the Botswana Department of Wildlife and National Parks (DWNP). We found Ostrich trails to be a good source of information for campgrounds and contacts details in Botswana.

Our top campsites that we just loved the most were:

1. Magotho. Rustic, remote.
2. Linyanti. The same, plus the river’s edge setting and all the elephants in the site!
3. Ngepi campground. Private, beautiful views, and I won’t lie – the woodfired outdoor bathtub.
4. Etosha Trading Post. Handy to Etosha but way more atmospheric than the ones in the park.
5. Brandburg White Lady Lodge. Beautiful setting, very secluded.
6. Klein Aus Vista. Simple site and the lodge it belongs to has a nice terrace and pool.

Costs

Our daily budget included fuel, accommodation, car rental, and food and drinks. Then there are also things like park fees, occasional road taxes, extra things we did along the way.

• We spent around 20 USD per night on campsites in South Africa, around 28 USD per night in Namibia, and just a bit more than that for campsites in Botswana outside the parks. That’s all based on two people in a site. Inside Botswana’s National parks, expect up to 50 USD per person per night for the popular governmental sites.
• Car rental will vary by season but basically – as a ballpark figure, the best quote we got (and took) was 155 USD per day.

Other essentials

• Visas. A lot of nationalities can travel here visa-free. Check your country’s visa requirements. Make sure you declare in advance if you’re planning to take the car across borders.
• Maps.me is indispensable. In addition to the actual route, a lot of detours and good stops are marked on it as well. Many people consider it better than Tracks4Africa.
• Powerbanks. Keep a full one handy just in case.
• Flashlight. For night time bathroom trips, if nothing else. Which reminds me: toilet paper.
• Some warm clothes for the chilly nights and mornings
• Screenshot or printouts of National park and campsite bookings.
• Money. There are plenty of ATMs in any town, and you can mostly pay by card everywhere. In remote areas it is always handy to have some cash for emergency. Most of our campsites we had to fully pay in advance.
• Sim, WiFi. We had an Airolo eSim for Nambia and Botswana. That worked fine apart from in the bush and rural areas. Most campsites in Namibia have WiFi. Campsites in Chobe will most likely not have WiFi or phone signal.
• Satellite phone. We only used it for a short call to the car agency to arrange the drop off….but then again I’d prefer not to need it anyway. It was good to have ‘just in case’ and cheap anyway.

Maun, and moving on

Eventually it was time to return our home on wheels, and get back on public transport. We were headed for Zambia next, but first took a break to rest up in Maun.

We sat in a Nando’s reliving the trip over chicken dinners…at least, a break from red meat. We slept comfortably in our air-conditioned room, and started making onward plans. But there is definitely something to be said for boerewors on the braai and falling asleep in a roof-tent on a chilly night under the stars, somewhere in Africa.

Read More

Looking for some inspiration? Read this post about the things we saw and did on this roadtrip. And there’s this post, about crossing the border from Botswana to Zambia.

Or check out the Destinations page for stories about our other off-beat adventures all over Africa. For a different type of safari, you can always ride the Tazara train from Zambia to Tanzania.

For more of our adventures (and misadventures) as we travel from Cameroon to Japan, check out the rest of my stories from the road.

The post Self-driving safari in southern Africa: itinerary and planning appeared first on WhirledAway.

Self-driving in Mongolia is definitely one of the world’s ultimate roadtrips. Thinking about taking it on? In this post I’ve outlined our 16 day self-driving itinerary, and I’ve provided information to help you plan your own ultimate roadtrip:

Transportation
Self-driving
Before you go – planning your trip
On the road – our itinerary
Back to Ulaanbaatar

If you like roadtrips then this one’s got it all. In case you’re wondering what you’ll find along the way, I’ve written a story about the very best of what we saw and did. Check it out here: Roadtripping in Mongolia: an off-road adventure.

Transportation

This post is about self-driving, but there are a few different ways you can travel around in Mongolia. Starting from Ulaanbaatar (UB), the capital, you can plan to travel by:

• Car and driver. The most popular way to go. You can join an organised tour, or you can hire your own private car with a driver (so, essentially also a tour). You can do this alone or you can band together with other travellers you meet in Ulaanbaatar. You are along for the ride and don’t need to worry about anything, although with a private tour you can of course plan your route and stops. This alternative is cheaper than hiring your own vehicle and driving yourself. To us, it looked boring – you just get kind of carted around from place to place. However, it’s definitely easier and you aren’t on the hook for the car, don’t have to worry about breakdowns or getting lost in the Gobi desert, or any of that type of thing.
• Public transport. The cheapest way to go is public transport but overall it’s not a great alternative in Mongolia. This will take a lot of time, where you can actually go is pretty limited, and you can’t just stop whenever you want to take photos, hike, and so on. There are bus connections between the bigger towns. However, there are not many big towns and when you get to them there is not that much to see or do in or close to the town itself. Most likely you’ll have to hire a car and driver to do anything outside town once you get there.
• Self-driving. You can drive your own car or rent one without a driver. Self-driving costs a lot more than public transport and actually even more than hiring a car with a driver. It’s surprisingly expensive to hire your own vehicle in Mongolia. For us it was more than worth it to pay (a fair bit) in exchange for total independence, and to be fully in charge of our own plans and pace. I’d say this is by far the best option, as long as you feel comfortable with the drive itself and with being alone in isolated areas.

Self-driving

We are in no way strangers to long, agonizing trips on unreliable and sometimes downright dangerous public transport. In fact we relish it and very often set off to do exactly that. We’ve taken on large swaths of Africa by public transport and that is no small feat. But in this case we decided to hire our own car and self-drive in Mongolia, wild camping on the way. That brought with it some different considerations, which I cover in this post.

If you decide to hire a car and self-drive in Mongolia, here are some things you’ll need to think about:

• Finding a car. There are a few travel companies who hire cars with camping equipment available. We contacted about four. One never responded at all, and one had sky-high quotes. Two were very prompt, responsive, and very helpful: Drive Mongolia and Mongolia.Travel. We met with both of these in person and got a lot of valuable insight from both, they took time to answer a lot of questions and help us figure out what would work best for us. They are both better and cheaper than for example, Sixt and Hertz, who never answered our emails. Sixt, which we visited in person, didn’t even send us the quote as promised after the in-person visit.
• It’s not cheap. Just because an astonishing number of locals drive a Prius come hell or high water, doesn’t mean you should undertake to do the same. You need a 4WD, and you can expect to pay around 120-250 USD/day (plus fuel) for a decent vehicle in low season.  Most likely you’d be looking at minimum 200 USD per day in high season, depending on the car. We were quoted 120 USD for a small Suzuki Jimney or similar, and 250 USD for a modified Toyota Land Cruiser. We ended up renting an unmodified Toyota Land Cruiser for 160 USD/day (original offer 180, we bargained and low season was on our side). It was perfect for us as we needed space to carry the gear and food for camping every night. Both the companies I mention above include unlimited kilometers, and throw the camp gear in on top as well.
• Accommodation. Do you want to bring a tent and camp, or stay in ger (yurt) camps? That will have some bearing on the vehicle you choose (i.e. if you need space to carry camping equipment, food, a fridge, and so on). It will also affect your costs – you can camp pretty much anywhere for free, staying in gers will obviously cost you. Some ger camps are actually just local people’s extra ger on their farm and that would be a cheaper and more authentic experience. If you haven’t already stayed in a million yurts in Kyrgyzstan, you could go for that. Many ger camps are built-up tourist developments and for the most part didn’t look appealing to us. We camped in our own tent, on purpose to get away from it all. In Mongolia you can camp anywhere as long as it is not private land or right next to a place of worship.
• Insurance. It’s not going to work the same way as it does in Europe (or wherever): for example, there’s no third-party insurance. So don’t hit anyone. Also the standard insurance the company offers might only cover up to half the value of the car. Depending on what sort of damage you potentially inflict, you could be on the hook for all of it, or for the total value of the car, so check what your own travel insurance covers. You can’t buy any regular insurance with a standard deductible from the rental company (unless you rent from Sixt or Hertz most likely). The entire rental process is very casual – we never once signed anything, there’s no real contract – you just take the keys and go.
• Mileage. We had unlimited kilometers and you definitely need that. On our 16-day road-trip we drove around 3700 kilometers.
• Your rental company. In the low season we barely saw other drivers while off-roading. In case of a breakdown you might have to wait several hours to a whole day for assistance. The rental companies know people in most towns who they will send to help – assuming you have signal on your phone and can call them. Your car provider should have a contingency plan and be reachable. When you’re arranging the car hire, ask them how they handle breakdowns and repairs. They’ll probably want to know at least an outline of your plans in advance and talking it over is a good idea – they can advise you about your route, and they’ll know approximately where you are. Ours asked us to check in daily on WhatsApp (if we had signal/wanted to). And, when we did in fact have a minor problem with the engine, they were extremely prompt in getting us in touch with a mechanic and fixing it fast (no cost to us, either).
• Collecting the car. You’ll pay the total up front and fork over a deposit in cash, usually around 500 USD. Make sure the registration papers are in the car. We got pulled over by the police a few times but they mainly just waved us through rather than ask for the papers. Any police we met were really nice, couldn’t speak English anyway, and absolutely never gave us a hard time for any reason.
• Fuel. Top up the tank whenever fuel is available. Stay as close to full as possible. Fuel is also more expensive the further you go so definitely fuel up in larger towns when you can. In larger towns we could pay for fuel (and food) with card.
• Road conditions and traffic. The roads vary constantly from smooth pavement, to sealed roads with potholes, to gravel roads with volcanic rock, to flat sandy roads in the steppe, to straight-up sand, and so on, but are often a lot better than you think. Traffic isn’t really an issue outside UB: in the low season (early-mid May), we could off-road drive for most of the day without seeing another vehicle.
• Driving. Last but certainly not least, consider your driving skills. We ended up driving off-road for around twenty-seven percent of our trip. We didn’t encounter difficult driving conditions other than sometimes a bit of sand or shallow water. However, later in the season some of the rivers will be deeper so you should cross only where other cars have crossed, and check the depth before crossing. A good rule of thumb for driving in Mongolia: if in doubt, just wait for a local to show up, inevitably driving a Prius in the most insane conditions, and show you how it’s done.And, one more thing to keep in mind: they drive on the right side of the road in Mongolia but in around eighty percent of cars, including our Land Cruiser, the wheel is also on the right side.

Before you go – planning your trip

With a little advance research and emailing, we managed to pick up a car on the spot when we arrived in UB overland from China. We wild camped every night (but one, in Kharkhorin) so we obviously had no bookings whatsoever. Many (but not all) ger camps were open when we were there at the end of low season, and if we’d wanted to stay at one we could have just walked in. That was in early-mid May.

However, if you are planning to go between June to September, you should book your car as early as in March. Cars get booked out in high season, and so do ger camps. If you’re planning on mainly staying in gers during the high season, you should check availability and book ahead.

When to go

Mongolia has a short tourist season (June to August/September), when thousands of South Koreans descend on the country because a Korean influencer recently Instagrammed a lot about it. Judging from the number of deserted yurt camps and karaoke bars it really does kick off, but in mid-May we were thankfully ahead of the crowds. We usually had the road and stops along the way entirely to ourselves.

Weather is also a factor, of course. We were there in late spring and without any other seasons to compare to, I would still say that that was the best time for us. It was a little chilly sometimes especially in the higher altitudes, but for the most part we had sun – and no crowds.

Starting from September/October, it just gets colder and colder, and of course snow in winter will make the driving a lot more difficult and camping impossible, in lots of places.

How many days

Before you book your car you should sort out your itinerary so you can figure out how many days you need. We ended up doing a 16-day loop of the central southern and northern regions of Mongolia, approximately 3700 km. It was a good mix of the Gobi desert, Buddhist monasteries, and the more rugged north.

If you want a shorter trip, you can plan for the Gobi desert and monasteries only and return to UB on our day 9.

Or, you could drive north to Lake Khuvsgul and make a circuit to Kharkhorin and back to UB.

You could also drop the national parks on our first and last days (Terelj and Hustai, respectively) to shorten your trip by 2 days. Both of these are fine to visit if you’ve got the time but if you don’t, you aren’t missing anything really special.

Basically – how many days do you want? For us, 16 days was a very comfortable amount of time to do what we wanted without rushing at all.

Things to bring

• Cash. Pull out tugrik (local currency) from ATMs in UB before you leave. It turned out we could pay by card at petrol stations in bigger towns, and at Nomin hypermarkets. Small places, entrance fees, gers – you’ll need cash for those. Basically, just bring cash to cover everything, and do not rely on card.
• Maps.me is indispensable. We would not have been able to do this trip without it. It has great off-roading track details and doesn’t run on your data. In addition to the actual route and off-road tracks, a lot of detours, stops, and ger camps are marked on it. Google maps will not cut it, other than on sealed roads.
• Google Translate and the Mongolian dictionary for offline use. This came in very handy for us, especially when we needed a mechanic. And certain foods. And almost anything.
• Powerbanks. You’ll probably be able to charge via a usb in the car (check on that. We needed to buy an adaptor to do this), and at night if you stay in a ger, but a powerbank or two is a good idea.
• Flashlight. For night time bathroom trips, if nothing else. Which reminds me: toilet paper.
• Food and water. We always made sure we had enough drinking water and cooking/washing water. We did most of our grocery shopping at Emart in UB on our way out of town. If you want cheese make sure you pick it up in UB. Your food choice, especially fresh food, gets really limited once you leave UB. You can pick up more supplies at Nomin hypermarkets on the way in the ‘bigger’ towns and some very basic items in the mini-markets which abound in every little village. We cooked almost all our meals in our camp sites and that was not only really nice, but also convenient. Make sure you bring gas bottles for your stove – you can find these in most mini-markets along the way.
• Camping gear. If you plan to camp, you can bring your own or most rental companies will throw it in for you. We had a tent, mattress, sleeping bags, table and chairs, stove, basic crockery set, and a fridge, included in our rental. Bonus if you can get an awning.
• Warm clothes in layers. You may need to sleep in them. In the summer, even. We had extra sleeping bags as well and we needed them at the lake. I slept with my toque on.
• Toolkit. This, and two spare tires, should obviously come with your car.
• And, super important to us at least: we are coffee lovers and always travel with an Aeropress to easily brew good coffee on the road.

Costs

Your budget should include the car, fuel, accommodation if you’re going for gers, and food on the road. For us it worked out like this:

• Toyota Land Cruiser with camping gear. 160 USD/day.
• Fuel. We spent a total of about 455 USD on fuel, including a final top-up before returning the car.
• Food. We spent about 350 USD on food, basic supplies, gas for the cookstove, wine, and beer. Of note here, food’s pretty cheap but we don’t like to cut corners there so we bought all kinds of nice stuff (from what was available anyway) and cooked 3 good meals a day.
• Entrance fees, road tolls, incidentals. You don’t encounter a lot of entrance fees and when you do, they are small – say from 1 to 3 USD per person for a monastery or similar. Hustai Park is the only ‘expensive’ one here, at around 10 USD per person. Road tolls are negligible – less than 1 USD here and there. Incidentals are up to you – for us, this was mainly coffee at any decent cafe we came across.
• Accommodation. We spent 35 USD on one night’s accommodation (Gaya’s Guesthouse). Otherwise, we camped. Apparently ger camps will range from 10 – 30+ USD per person, depending on standard etc. We brought enough cash to cover a few nights in gers but never bothered as we were perfectly happy camping.

In total about 3600 USD on the road, for two people on a 16 day trip. Of this, the car we paid up front and the rest we paid on the way mainly in cash (local currency of course).

Keeping in touch

• WiFi. Some cafes had WiFi. I assume some ger camps would too.
• SIMs. We bought 2 local SIMs, Unitel and Mobicom. This meant we had coverage most of the way apart from really remote areas. In our experience Mobicom worked the most often. Bringing two different ones is a really good idea.

On the road – our itinerary

This post is about our experience self-driving in Mongolia and wild camping for 16 days. You can certainly adapt any part of our itinerary to suit yourself with a car and driver. Some parts can also be done by public transport.

To find out more about these places we stopped and camped at, you can read this post about the very best of what we saw and did along the way.

DAY 1 – Ulaanbaatar to Gorhki Terelj

Kilometers: 108 | Hours: 2.5

Gorhki Terelj National Park is only 70 km from Ulaanbaatar. People go there as a day-trip or short overnighter from UB, or, you can build it into your road-trip as we did.

On the way out of UB we stopped at Emart Chinngis to stock up on most of our groceries for the entire trip. Ulaanbaatar traffic is pretty insane so set off after 09:00 and before 17:00. When driving out of UB make sure you detour 19 km to see the massive statue of Mongolia’s main man, Genghis Khan.

As it’s so close to UB, Terelj is very developed and even over-crowded with ger camps. Since we were there on a weekday in low season, it wasn’t an issue for us (if you overlook the post-apocalyptic atmosphere brought on by so many desolate ger camps). There’s a famous rock formation if you’re into that kind of thing, and the Buddhist Temple up in the beautiful hillside. We camped just down from the monastery and it was very peaceful.

DAY 2 – Gorkhi Terelj to White Stupa (Tsagaan Suvarga)

Kilometers: 510 | Hours: 8.5

This day is a long driving day, so get an early start. The road is sealed all the way until the last 37 km, with lots of potholes most of the way until Mandelgovi. We fueled up there and you can also grab supplies at the Nomin hypermarket.

Following Maps.me we attempted to off-road from a shortcut marked ‘good dirt road suitable to 2WD sedan’. This got us lost until we changed Maps.me from driving to hiking. The best way would be to just follow the main route on Maps.me and not attempt random shortcuts. Plot in Tsagaan Suvarga.

The drive goes through beautiful trails on the steppe, then turns into light sand and gravel closer to the stupa. There’s an area at the top of the White Stupa where you can park and pay a small fee. We didn’t do that but instead just drove around to the foot of the stupa following the tracks on the right side. These tracks are a little steep at times so take it slow. At the bottom there’s plenty of space to camp with great views of the stupa. From there you can hike up to the top in 10-15 minutes.

DAY 3 – White Stupa to Yol Valley

Kilometers: 210 | Hours: 3

If you didn’t drive in on the ‘2WD sedan ‘shortcut”, you’ll be driving out the same way you came in, 37 km to the paved road. The road is in good condition with sand and gravel, then you reach the sealed road going towards Dalanzadgad. The first thing that meets you after the elaborate town gate is a massive Nomin hypermarket. So, no worries about supplies. And you can get a pretty decent cup of coffee at Caffe Grande.

From Dalanzagad it’s another half hour till you get to the entrance of the National Park that Yol Valley is inside of. In mid-May there was nobody there to collect the park fee of 3000 tugrik. After the gate it’s another half hour/10 km to the parking lot, which is the starting point for the Yol Valley walking trail. In mid-May the trail lies under a thick icefield that still hadn’t melted. The trail doesn’t really have an end – just walk as far as you feel like and then turn back.

Don’t camp around the parking lot. We drove back about 2 km and found a beautiful little valley close to the road on the right hand side and set up our camp there.

DAY 4 – Yol Valley to Khongoryn Els

Kilometers: 180 | Hours: 4.5

The road to Bayandalai is in great condition. In town you can fuel up (the next gas station is in Bulgan), get supplies, and a decent cup of coffee at Tod coffee shop. After Bayandalai the off-roading starts on a light sandy steppe road in good condition. After some time it turns into gravel and eventually to light sandy tracks. This whole day is pretty much off-road, and we rarely saw another vehicle.

We arrived at Khongoryn Els is a sandstorm, but found our way with Maps.me. You pass through an entrance gate close to the sand dunes – some of the tracks on Maps.me go through a fence which looked pretty new. From the gate you drive another 10-15 minutes to the biggest dunes. You can camp anywhere close to the dunes. There are plenty of gers outside of the gates scattered around here and there but nothing close by to disturb you.

DAY 5 – Khongoryn Els (rest day)

The weather changed for the better and we stayed an extra day at Khongoryn Els. This was a good way to break up some of the driving days. We climbed up the dunes at sunset and sunrise. It’s about a 45 minute climb if you’re in reasonable shape and it’s actually pretty tiring but also pretty awesome, don’t miss it. These are some of the biggest, cleanest, emptiest sand dunes I’ve seen.

DAY 6 – Khongoryn Els to Flaming Cliffs

Kilometers: 150 | Hours: 3.5

The drive to Bulgan takes around three hours on good, sandy off-road tracks. In Bulgan you can get supplies, fuel, and coffee. After Bulgan it’s only another 30 minutes to Flaming Cliffs. The area is fenced off and you have to pass through a gate and pay a fee. We camped in a sheltered spot next to the cliffs. Again, just drive around until you find a spot that suits you, and set up.

DAY 7 – Flaming Cliffs to Onjiin Monastery

Kilometers: 190 | Hours: 3.5

The landscape to Mandel-ovoo is interesting and we were really on our own driving through the desert. Again, this entire day is off-road, and we barely saw another vehicle. Once you reach Mandel-ovoo you can stock up on supplies and fuel (but no coffee). After Mandel-ovoo the road turns into steppe and you can go pretty fast on smooth tracks – be careful. Around here, we got a flat tire and our engine started making an ominous hissing noise. We changed the tire ourselves, and in the next town got a mechanic to take a look at, and fix, whatever was going on with the engine.

In Ongiin we camped by the river close to a ger camp called ‘Secret of Ongiin’. It’s actually a pretty spot and you can visit the old monastery ruins from here, and drop by the camp’s restaurant if you want.

DAY 8 – Ongiin Monastery to Kharkhorin

Kilometers: 330 | Hours: 5

The drive to Saikan-ovoo, where you can fuel up (and see a mechanic), takes around half an hour. After Saikan-ovoo it’s another 2 hours off-road on sandy tracks in good condition, till you reach the paved road. From the paved road it’s smooth sailing all the way to Kharkhorin.

In Kharkhorin we checked in to Gaya’s Guesthouse for a proper shower and beds, for the first time in a week (and only time altogether, for that matter). We also went out for dinner here (you are not missing anything if you don’t). From Kharkhorin if you’re making a shorter trip, you can drive straight back to UB the next day.

DAY 9 – Kharkhorin to Khorgo-Uul Volcano

Kilometers: 285 | Hours: 4

We went to Kharkhorin Monastery in the morning. Give yourself a little time to explore there.

The road to Khorgo-Uul is mostly paved, with a few short stretches of hard gravel over some small hills. We stopped in Tsetserleg on the way to eat at Fairfield cafe, which is probably the only place outside of UB worth eating an actual meal at. The town itself is another unappealing Mongolian town, there are quite a few of those.

After Tariat the road turns into volcanic gravel for the last 5 km until you reach the base of the volcano itself. It’s bumpy going. We drove past the gers into the valley and found a sheltered place to camp.

The volcano itself is not wildly impressive (climb up and take a look) but we liked camping there as the surrounding nature is beautiful.

DAY 10 – Khorgo-Uul Volcano to Murun (Moron)

Kilometers: 310 | Hours: 9

This is a long driving day so get an early start. The first 140 km are nicely paved. After that it’s off-roading all the way to Murun. Maps.me will for some reason try to get you to go around through Ikh-Uul over the bridge and back to the other side. We did that, but for once Maps.me let us down. Instead, you should drive towards Jargalant and go over the bridge just before the village. This should save you an hour.

After Jargalant the road is ok but it gets more remote. There is a small mountain pass before you get to Shine-Ider. After Shine-Ider it gets very remote again and you go through another small mountain pass before you reach Lake Zurkh.

Be careful around here, and in general in more remote areas: sometimes there are a lot of tracks criss-crossing each other wildly and your map will be confused. In cases like this you actually want to stay ‘on the beaten path’ as that is your best bet for actually getting somewhere at the end of the day. The tracks will merge again and match up with your map…eventually.

We took the wrong track for a while, and although it looked pretty dubious we kept going, until the car teetered on the edge of a huge rut in the road at the bottom of a hill. On the verge of getting stuck, Oyv nevertheless felt the best plan of action was to attack the road with a shovel and dig a new level track himself, rather than backtrack and find the right one. Then a nomad showed up on a motorcycle out of nowhere and made a gesture at us which was either asking us to join him for a drink, or else accusing us of already being drunk (probably that, based on our apparent road-construction plans). He waved his arms dramatically and had us follow him around and back onto the proper track. So, you don’t always need Maps.me.

Just before you reach Murun you get to a river. We camped there as if you drive any further you’ll reach town and be camping in a field on the outskirts.

DAY 11 – Murun (Moron) to Lake Khuvsgul

Kilometers: 100 | Hours: 1.5

Murun is the second biggest town in Mongolia. Here you can stock up on supplies at the ubiquitous Nomin hypermarket and top up your fuel. Arya is a nice cafe with good cake too.

From here the road is sealed all the way to Hatgal and then you can drive up either side of the lake on hard gravel. In mid-May the lake was still frozen further north so we camped close to Hatgal on the eastern side. The western side seems to have more gers.

DAY 12 – Lake Khuvsgul (restday)

This day we just spent relaxing at the lake. A lot of the space is closed off private property so there’s only so much we could do. Apparently during the season you can kayak and so on, but we were early, so we just drove and walked around the edge of the lake and hung out in our campsite.

DAY 13 – Lake Khuvsgul to Uran-Togoo vulcano

Kilometers: 370 | Hours: 5.5

This is a driving day, which we used to basically break up the otherwise very long journey from the lake, to Amarbayasgalant monastery. We drove on a sealed road for most of the day, and then another 10 kilometers off-road to where we randomly stopped to camp.

DAY 14 – Uran-Togoo vulcano to Amarbayasgalant Khiid

Kilometers: 250 | Hours: 4.5

We drove from our campsite back out to the main road. From there we continued towards Amarbayasgalant monastery on a sealed road all the way until you reach the turn-off and go off-road for the last 35 km. Before the turn-off, we stopped in Erdenet for coffee and some supplies.

You can camp anywhere you like in front of or around the monastery. Make sure you give yourself time either this afternoon or the next morning, to explore the monastery complex and walk up to the stupas behind it as well.

DAY 15 – Amarbayasgalant Khiid to Hustai National Park

Kilometers: 392 | Hours: 6

Drive the same 35 km off-road from the monastery back out to the sealed road. Then, it’s sealed road all the way until the turn-off for Hustai National Park. From there you drive about another 13 km to the park entrance. There’s a big car park area where you pay the 35 000 tugrik per person entry fee. The big draw for this park is the wild horses which you may (or may not) see as you drive through. There’s absolutely no camping in the park itself anymore and most people stay in the big ger camp next to the park entrance. There’s also a basketball court there and some empty space where you can apparently pitch your tent, and use the showers and other facilities in the ger camp.

That did not seem appealing to us so we drove back the same way we came towards the main road. On the way there are some rolling sand dunes and camped in those instead. Again, if you wanted to you could just drive straight back to UB skipping the park.

DAY 16 – Hustai National Park/campsite to Ulaanbaatar

Kilometers: 95 | Hours: 2-3 (traffic can be wild)

Like the heading says: after breakfast we dismantled our last campsite and drove back to UB. Beds in a guesthouse (City Guesthouse and Tours, very nice), hot showers, a couple of cold beers:)

Back to Ulaanbaatar

After all that sandy dusty off-roading and driving in the empty windswept steppe, heading back into Ulaanbaatar was by far the worst part, driving-wise, of the whole trip (tied with driving out of it, 16 days earlier). UB is a little chaotic and messy, especially if you arrive at rush hour after a road-trip where passing two other cars in the course of a morning was a noteworthy occurrence.

‘I want the spaghetti carbonara’ I’d said one night as I attempted to make dinner on the camp stove in a small windstorm, without stirring in more than a couple mouthfuls of sand. I was referring to an Italian place in UB that’s definitely one of the better options in town. So after we’d settled into our guesthouse and gotten presentable (more or less) we went straight there. It was a sunny afternoon in UB and we were feeling pretty great. The trip was fantastic and we lingered over our pasta and wine with a sense of accomplishment, thinking over everything we’d just seen and done.

Read More

To read more about travelling in Mongolia, you might want to take a look at this post:

Roadtripping in Mongolia: an off-road adventure

Or, if you’re still in China but thinking about heading to Mongolia by land, check out this post about crossing the border from China to Mongolia.

The post Self-driving roadtrip in Mongolia: itinerary and planning appeared first on WhirledAway.

I have about zero patience with technology so every time an app which our lives depended on failed us for some mysterious reason – which happened a lot – I longed for the good old days of paying with cash on the spot. Or just showing up somewhere and seeing what happens. I’d rather wing it than have to advance book an appointment just to, say, enter Tiananmen square.

It felt weird to be in cities so modern, so sleek, so similar to home, and yet so very foreign. Everything looked familiar but we were often lost, especially in huge train stations. Translation apps never make for sparkling conversation anyway, and this is how most of our interactions went, most of the time we were in China:

Sometimes we’d see English signs and get our hopes up, but it rarely worked out well:

Oyv (holding out his phone to a smiling girl under an English ‘Information’ sign): ‘Where is platform 62?’
Smiling girl (under the English sign, on her phone): ‘This is not the train station, international friends.’
Oyv (typing frantically as the train is due to depart in five minutes): ‘Ok…where is the train station?’
Smiling girl (points to a distant gate beyond yet another security barrier): ‘Just take this badger.’

China is second only to India in terms of population, but the crowds in India somehow paled in comparison to those we encountered in China. The Chinese are voraciously discovering their own country, which means that everywhere we went we moved in throngs of local tourists, who dutifully trooped around in herds behind tour guides waving flags on sticks.

We went to see the Forbidden City in Beijing. It was just us, the Chairman, and about forty thousand tourists:

There seemed to be at least three or four tourists for each one of the eight thousand terracotta warriors in Xi’an. The soldiers rested in peace in an Emperor’s grave from 209 BC until 1974 when they were accidentally unearthed by some farmers. Now they’re one of the world’s most famous archaeological discoveries.

At the Panda Base research centre in Chengdu tourists pushed their way to the railings for selfies with a dozing panda’s fluffy butt, and vigilant security guards shouted continuously at lingerers (us) to funnel everybody through the panda nurseries as efficiently as possible.

But we were lucky with the Great Wall and ended up there on a day with surprisingly low numbers. We walked on the wall for hours, marveling not just at the wall itself – but at the green hills rolling away in all directions, devoid of people or buildings.

In the midst of all that, we quickly discovered that it’s always snack time in China (unless it’s time for lunch, or dinner). Translation apps are generally almost useless when it comes to menus anyway:

We gleefully abandoned our phones and just picked, pointed, guessed, and sampled our way through every meal.

Although we generally avoided anything of the foot or beak (or face) variety.

Particularly in Sichuan the food is often insanely hot, and almost always delicious. To combine heat and flavour, we’d opt for hot pot. Pick your sticks, fire up the tabletop stove, bring the pot right under your nose to a lively boil, and get cooking.

Plus, let me just say: Peking duck. I don’t even like to think about how many ducks died to bring us this deliciousness.

Still, after about twelve days in China we were maxed out on apps, crowds, and to a certain extent on duck.

Meanwhile, in Mongolia

Maybe it’s just me, but the very first word that comes to mind when I think of Mongolia is ‘hordes’. To be fair, I haven’t thought of Mongolia often…but for a place once famously home to all sorts of hordes, it’s actually pretty freaking empty now. Landlocked and wedged between Russia and China, today Mongolia is the least densely populated country on earth.

Right next door, and yet so drastically different. What better antidote to big crowds than a roadtrip in an almost-uninhabited country? The Gobi desert, the endless steppe, the taiga – all that vast emptiness where our phones wouldn’t work reliably anyway. It was just waiting to be explored. And as it turned out, my phone got stolen within a day of arriving in the capital, which solved the problem of device-dependency for me.

To reach this mysterious land, we first spent a sleepless night on a bus from Beijing to the Mongolian border. Since we never quite understood what was happening in China anyway, we’d ended up on a cargo bus of sorts. It was overloaded with large duct-taped plastic bundles and cardboard boxes – the hallmark of the importer/exporter. It left well behind the alleged schedule and the importers/exporters chatted loudly long into the night, and then they snored for the rest of it.

Once across the border, the following day went to waiting in a grim frontier town for the Trans-Mongolian train to arrive. When it pulled in, we boarded in an atmospheric sandstorm.

In incredibly high spirits we went straight to the restaurant carriage for celebratory beers.

Then we made ramen noodles with hot water from the samovar and slept soundly in our bunks for the rest of the sixteen hour journey.

The next morning the train rolled slowly into town. There’s a yurt-city that stretches for a few kilometers on the outskirts of Ulaanbaatar. About three million people live in Mongolia and almost half of them are in UB, as they call the capital on the steppe. The rest of them are scattered around in the Gobi desert, the endless steppe, the taiga.

How to sum up Ulaanbaatar…

We spent the next couple of days looking for a Land Cruiser. UB isn’t an appealing city. Full of karaoke bars and bad food, it’s also got the dubious distinction of being the coldest capital on earth.

We noticed a exorbitant number of warnings about pickpockets, and a corresponding number of second hand phone stores. With ‘Find my iPhone’ turned on, we tracked my stolen phone’s location to a parking lot ringed with dodgy phone shops.

Hiring a car in Mongolia is a fairly casual transaction. We transferred the payment, forked over five hundred USD cash as deposit, and took the keys. When I asked the agent about a contract, she just shrugged. She had a point. We were about to drive this car anywhere we wanted to, on the road or not, and set up camp wherever we felt like it. Why get bogged down in paperwork?

That night we camped in front of a Buddhist monastery in a national park (after managing to drive said Land Cruiser out of Ulaanbaatar). It wasn’t the first monastery we’d camp at, although it was the only one with a sign on the gates to watch out for pickpocketers. We weren’t sure who they meant we should beware of – the monks? Already, there was almost no one else around.

Into the Gobi desert

At over a million square kilometers, the Gobi desert is the largest desert in Asia, and there’s a lot more to it than sand.

There’s ice: the deep icefield in Yolyn Am canyon doesn’t melt until July, and then it’s back again in early winter. There used to be an ocean. Tsagaan Suvarga, or the White Stupa, was on the ocean floor until the water dried up millions of years ago.

And there were dinosaurs, once. The first discovery of dinosaur eggs was made here.

But yes, there’s plenty of sand too. After a day of off-roading on a faint track, we parked the car right in front of Khongoryn Els – the ‘singing sand dunes’. Up to three hundred metres high, the dunes towered over our camp.

The nickname comes from the sound when the wind picks up and the sand scuds along against the dunes’ steep sides. And the wind definitely picked up. Climbing the dunes is a ‘one step forward three steps back’ vertical backslide with a full body exfoliating sandblast.

We hung out in the shade of the Land Cruiser all alone at the foot of the dunes.

On the second night we cooked up Norwegian farikal from an unidentified piece of lamb. It was ironic. Mongolian food is terrible – there’s a lot of boiled lamb – and here we were boiling up a piece of lamb on our camp stove in our effort to avoid local food at all costs.

Incidentally, the translator app failed us here, too. We’d asked in the shop which part of the sheep it was, but either the girl didn’t know or just wouldn’t say.

The old Mongol capital

Mongolia’s main man Ghenghis Khan united the Mongol tribes in the early 1200s and the resulting empire was actually the biggest in history. It covered up to twenty-two percent of the earth at the time and comprised a quarter of its population, despite Genghis’s army killing millions on the way.

Most Mongolians revere Genghis Khan as the father of their nation and have named everything from an airport to a beer to city landmarks after him.

Today Kharkhorin is just a sleepy little town on the edge of the rolling, stony steppe. For us, it was the only place where we slept in a bed during more than two weeks of camping (as well as the only place we took showers). But in the thirteenth century it was the site of Karakorum, capital of the Mongol Empire under Genghis Khan’s son Ogedei, and no doubt home to hordes of people who didn’t shower much.

There’s not much left of Karakorum. The Mongol empire collapsed, Buddhism reemerged in the 1500s, and in 1585 Erdene Zuu Monastery was built next to – and pretty much out of – the ancient city’s ruins.

Buddhism flourished, though I’d imagine the same can’t be said of the population, since by the 1920s around thirty percent of Mongolian men were Buddhist monks.

The edge of Siberia

We drove past herds of camels, horses, and yaks – roaming free or corralled by cowboys on motorcycles.

We wild camped anywhere we felt like pitching our tent – next to a volcano, in shady green clearings, on the grass in front of old monasteries in otherwise desolate valleys.

There’s an icy lake on the southern border of Siberia. We camped there too, in doubled-up sleeping bags.

One morning we woke up to a herd of yaks grazing for breakfast nearby our tent:

And speaking of breakfast, we excel at camp-cooking:

Some days we rarely saw another vehicle. When we did manage to come across one, Oyv usually tailgated it relentlessly.

And yes, we inevitably got a flat. We changed the tire but the engine was making an ominous noise. For once we weren’t in the middle of nowhere, but only fifteen kilometers from yet another monastery – with a semi-deserted resort hotel right next door. At the tiny settlement some hotel staff called a mechanic from the next town over. He drove up, shirtless, and grunted something we guessed meant ‘Ok you morons, let’s go’ at us and so we followed him to his workshop.

The translator app came in handy for once, since we successfully used it to drag mostly everyone at the monastery plus the shirtless mechanic and his wife, into our predicament.

Back to civilization

There’s never a bulldozer when you need one…unless someone happens to drop by with one, in the middle of the night.

One night we camped under some trees on a grassy patch faraway from any town. It was a spur-of-the-moment choice. Oyv just turned the wheel and drove straight off the road and about ten kilometers into the hills. Around eleven pm we woke up in the tent to the sound of an engine, and then two voices. They didn’t leave so we unzipped the door and peered out to see a bulldozer loaded on the back of a flatbed truck a few meters away. A very bemused-looking woman peered back in at us.

Oyv: ‘Um…good evening?’
Bemused woman (something in Mongolian along the lines of): ‘Yeah, so you aren’t the ones who asked us to drop off this bulldozer.’
Sar and Oyv: ‘Alright then, goodnight!’

We zippered the door back up and in the morning the people and the bulldozer were gone. Moral of the story: be careful where you decide to pee because even if you think you are alone, you really might not be.

On our last afternoon we drove past a herd of horses, over a little stream, and into some rolling dunes. We set up camp one last time, pitching the tent in the midst of a ring of small sandy hills.

In the morning, we drove the rest of the way back to UB and managed to park the car in the city despite wild traffic. Back to civilization, which in this case meant beds in a guesthouse, hot showers, and Genghis Khan beer.

Read More

For more of our adventures (and misadventures) as we travel from Cameroon to Japan, check out the rest of my stories from the road.

Thinking about taking on this roadtrip yourself? Read this post for our itinerary and lots of practical advice: Self-driving roadtrip in Mongolia: itinerary and planning.

Or if you’re in China and planning to travel to Mongolia by road, have a look at this post: How to cross the border from China to Mongolia.

The post Roadtripping in Mongolia: an off-road adventure appeared first on WhirledAway.

Not much, we thought, especially since we were starting this trip in Cameroon. We figured by the time we’d dragged ourselves through Central Africa on public transport, we’d be ready for a break. Anything the road threw at us, flat tires or broken canopy brackets, rampaging elephants, sandpits, not actually knowing how to handle a 4×4 off-road – all that would pale in comparison. So we arranged to pick up a 4×4 Ford Ranger in Johannesburg.

But first, some helpful hints

We’re not strangers to adventurous drives. But this is southern Africa we’re talking about, so before signing off on a fully loaded camping vehicle and driving it out of Johannesburg, we did some research into security. Oyv read up on all the ways to avoid getting carjacked, such as rolling into intersections but never quite stopping, opening driveway gates at the very last second, and not driving in South Africa. It’s not quite like roadtripping in Australia’s top end, for example, where we stopped and got out whenever we wanted. Or when we drove the Pamir highway in Tajikistan, picnicking our way along the Afghan border. This felt different. By the time we finished reading the warnings and advice we’d reached the conclusion that we could barely step out of the car at a petrol station. With a mental note to double check what would happen if the car got stolen, we headed off to the rental office.

‘This is Africa’ said Kevin the car rental guy for the third time during the vehicle handover. ‘There are animals everywhere. Elephants in the road left and right in Botswana. If you get too close, they’ll get mad, and you’ll cry.’ He nodded seriously, but he wasn’t done. ‘Never talk to anyone around an ATM. Those guys are mean. They’ll take your money and you’ll cry.’ He showed Oyv the tool kit and how to pop the roof tent. Then: ‘This is your department’ said Kevin to me, and he demonstrated turning the gas stove on and off.

It wasn’t just carjacking, elephants, and ATM thieves that we might end up crying about according to Kevin. ‘Look, Namibia is full of puff adders’, he went on. ‘They’re lazy, but they strike fast. And it’s the scorpions and spiders in the firewood you really have to watch out for.’ He stared pointedly at my feet in flip flops.

On the way to our first camp we stopped in a small town for groceries. There were signs posted around the parking lot and out in the street warning that this was a high crime area. A fellow shopper approached us as we loaded our fridge with boerewors and wine. ‘There are bad people here’ she said, eyeing the car and then a group of guys lurking around an ATM. We stopped organizing the fridge in a manner my Dad would have approved of, and just tossed everything in and locked up.

But nothing could dampen our enthusiasm. Camp cooking essentials onboard, we were finally ready to go. And nobody stole the truck while we were in the Shoprite, so that was a plus.

Into (and out of) the Kalahari

The Trans-Kgalagadi National Park in the Kalahari desert overlaps the borders of South Africa, Namibia, and Botswana. It means that you can drive into the park from one country and out into another.

We’d been staying in a campground on the South African side where pensioners had staked claim to all the best sites and set up for life, with astroturf lawns rolled out in front of their trailers. The camp was also overrun with meerkats hiding from a vicious honey badger on the other side of the fence.

Early one morning, we drove out of the park from South Africa into Namibia, and the road immediately stretched ahead of us into nothingness.

Our first stop in all that emptiness was Kolmanskop, a ghost town partially buried under shifting sand dunes.

In 1908 in what was then German South-West Africa, somebody around here found a diamond in the sand. The government declared the entire place off-limits and brought in miners. The new settlement thrived, complete with a school, hospital, and a tram line. It was easier to import cases of champagne than to get water, and they had all sorts of entertainment including a laundromat doubling as a brothel. Obviously.

The houses had electricity, indoor plumbing, and refrigeration – not bad for the times, and considering their location in the Namib desert. Some original furniture is still here, and you can even leaf through the purchaser’s book of orders.

But diamonds aren’t forever. By the late 1920s the miners moved on in pursuit of the next big rush, leaving Kolmanskop to the sands of time in a very real way.

There might be some diamonds left though. The surrounding Sperrgebiet – prohibited area – is still off-limits, signed with threats of fines and imprisonment in case anyone thought of doing a little digging.

Speaking of things located in the Namib desert, less than a day’s drive from Kolmanskop are some of the tallest sand dunes on the planet.

The very tallest of these ancient orange and red dunes surround a salt pan called Sossusvlei, and reach staggering heights of over 300 meters.

The best way to truly appreciate this height is by climbing up and running down these sand mountains under the hot glare of the desert sun. You can also try inexpertly driving your 4×4 through a ‘sand river’.

There’s another salt pan nearby named Deadvlei – so called because it’s filled with the sun-blackened remains of camel thorn trees.

The pan was a green oasis once, but the river dried up and the trees died. In all that dryness the trees didn’t decompose, and they still stand here now – almost a thousand years later.

And still, we kept driving.

When we’d driven far enough the desert gave way to the ocean and we stopped at Cape Cross. In 1486 the sea-faring explorer Diego Cao also stopped here, and set about claiming the place for Portugal with a large stone cross he’d brought especially for this purpose. It’s thought that he landed here because he noticed the hordes of seals carpeting the shore.

They smell terrible so the place is hard to miss.

The Portuguese are long gone, although they explored and exploited their way up and down the coast of West Africa for years to come. But tens of thousands of seals on their way north continue to flock to the colony, and we all keep stopping here, despite the smell.

Home on the road

‘There are lions and leopards around here. Don’t leave the site on foot.’ said the campsite manager, and then he jumped in his pickup and drove off, leaving us standing in a clearing all alone. Yep, from meerkats to lions and everything in between – puff adders come to mind – camping in southern Africa is next-level.

It took us exactly one camp cooking session and a single night in the roof tent to start considering stealing the truck ourselves and becoming vanlifers.

Yeah sure, there’s a steep learning curve which we kind of failed – on day 5 we didn’t deflate the tires enough before hitting a long gravelly stretch of road and we punctured a tire. On night 4 as Oyv attempted to light the fire and grill an unspecified piece of game meat in a blustering icy wind, we wondered why Kevin didn’t add freezing to death to his list of things to potentially cry about – it’s winter here after all, and desert nights are cold. Heart attacks wouldn’t be out of place on Kevin’s list either. Throwing a piece of red meat on the braai is the cornerstone of southern African culture and every evening we could be found grilling up a nice juicy slab of it.

And we still had the occasional brush with crime to contend with. Like when a manager at a remote campsite remarked that we should keep an eye out for poachers. ‘We had an incident a month ago’ she said. I envisioned a rhino lying next to the road, horn slashed off. ‘They came from across the river’ she went on and I cast a glance at the narrow strip of water running across one side of our site. ‘And they stole all our laundry’.

But…camp life.

We tried all sorts of sites, from isolated no-frills bush camping to tidy little camps with open-air kitchens and showers. Sometimes there was a fence between us and the unknown, and other times…not so much.

And sometimes Oyv made us a ‘wildlife barrier’, as he called it:

Sometimes we were all alone with nothing but mysterious noises from the darkness on all sides (hippos, for starters, are surprisingly noisy at night). Other times we had a few more amenities like this bath with water we heated on a wood burning stove:

One of our campgrounds was next to a big waterhole, floodlit at night. We sat there in total silence, watching the rhinos and elephants come to drink.

Afterwards, we fell asleep in our roof-tent listening to lions roaring in the night.

Botswana – elephant country

‘If I see another elephant’s ass…’ I muttered into my water bottle. ‘Well, it’s not like you want to get right in their face though’ Oyv pointed out reasonably enough. We were stopped again, waiting at a relatively safe distance behind some elephants in the road. Keeping your distance is easier said than done, when you never know where the next herd will appear.

We hadn’t experienced a wildlife shortage yet, and most of it seemed to congregate in the roads, but by the time we reached Botswana it was bordering on ridiculous. I mean that in a good way. These animals are amazing, even if they do disrupt traffic. Botswana really, truly, is elephant country.

To cross into Botswana we had to drive the car through a shallow pool of disinfectant and then get out and step into trays of it ourselves. There’s hoof and mouth disease in Namibia but they’ve stopped it at the border somehow, and are vigilant about keeping it out. Officers searching cars for meat products, and potentially contaminated shoes – it’s a different sort of border control than we are used to in Africa.

Once we left town, we used maps.me to find our way around on roads that weren’t much more than faint trails etched in the dirt or deeply rutted stretches of treacherous sand. Besides the app, we also had a map, traced in the dust by the owner of the last lodge we stayed at back in civilization.

Jim, the owner, reminded me a bit of Kevin at the car rental. He was full of stories of previous guests who had to be towed out of axle-deep sand, or got lost for days between camps. ‘We’ve got a satellite phone with us’ I pointed out. ‘So did they, sweetheart’ said Jim darkly.

And so we spent the next few days in elephant country.

Camped near a marsh, a herd of elephants used a path right next to our site to get to the water.

In the night I woke up to the sound of heavy footsteps and lay awake, listening, holding my breath. Peering carefully out the window, we watched an elephant move past, then stop to eat from the trees next to our tent.

We passed hours just watching the elephants all around, leaving our campsite only to go for short game drives.

Then we’d come back to camp to cook dinner, watching as the elephants left the water and disappeared somewhere into the bush for the night, and eventually I’d get antsy about lions and go up into the tent.

Driving back to town, we came close to it a few times but we never did get stuck in the sand.

…Back to reality (Nando’s chicken, Maun)

Eventually it was time to return our home on wheels, and get back on public transport. But in Botswana even a spin in a taxi can be a mini-safari, giving way for elephants and giraffes, zooming past zebras.

We sat in a Nando’s reliving the trip over chicken dinners…at least, a break from red meat. We slept comfortably in our air-conditioned room, and started making onward plans….after all, we’ve got months ahead on the road. It’s all good. But there is definitely something to be said for boerewors on the braai and falling asleep in a roof-tent on a chilly night under the stars, somewhere in Africa.

Read More

For more of our adventures (and misadventures) as we travel from Cameroon to Japan, check out the rest of my stories from the road.

Or, maybe you’re planning a trip like this one yourself? Take a look at this guide: Self-driving safari in southern Africa: itinerary and planning.

The post Home is where the car is: a roadtrip in Southern Africa appeared first on WhirledAway.

Travelling the Pamir Highway from end to end is one of the world’s greatest roadtrips. We aren’t the best advance-planners, and I don’t even have a driver’s license, but the very idea of this road had a grip on us both and that was enough. So we hired ourselves a Toyota Forerunner from an agent in Kyrgyzstan, and that’s how the whole thing started.

We’d arranged to pick the car up in Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan and home of the world’s tallest flagpole (you’d think they could be content with the second-highest highway, but no). Since we rarely start a trip in the country we’re actually aiming for, we travelled down from Almaty in Kazakhstan, via Uzbekistan on the way. And that’s how we ended up in Samarkand one night at a restaurant decorated by somebody with really awful taste in everything, having a mini-mental breakdown at the realisation that we were about to head pretty high up into some pretty remote mountains without much of a clue about what we were doing. Driving the Pamir Highway isn’t just a matter of hopping in the car with your phone and a latte. There are things to bring, a route to map out, stops to consider.

So despite not being advance-planners, we did our research and planned to get to Dushanbe with a day to spare. We’d spend that spare day grocery shopping, organising stuff, and marvelling at the world’s tallest flagpole. We’d get a good night’s sleep and well rested, we’d calmly set off on the highway.

Instead, delayed by rockslides blocking the road from the Tajik border to the capital we arrived in Dushanbe the evening before we were due to set off. We spent a couple of hours running madly around a supermarket throwing ramen noodles and instant coffee into the trolley, and didn’t even get a glimpse of the flagpole.

But we were ready.

The next morning we loaded the car and drove out of Dushanbe, excitement and anticipation running high.

During the chaos the night before Oyv apparently managed to eat something that disagreed with him and he pulled over to throw up three times. Even that couldn’t dampen our enthusiasm. After all, we were on the road at the very start of the famous Pamir Highway, ready to travel into the unknown and see what we could find there.

Here’s some of what we found.

Stunning Landscapes

Mountains and moonscapes, alpine lakes, winding rivers – this is a truly beautiful part of the world.

When the road wasn’t etched into the side of a mountain, it stretched out in front of us through endless stark plateaus or green valleys.

Sometimes the road turned unexpectedly to sand.

Off-roading, we reached shimmering mountain lakes, frosted with ice at the edges.

These are the kinds of places we stopped to just look at, a dozen times a day.

Adventure

An ever-changing and wild landscape naturally brings some adventure with it. Steep dirt roads with hairpin turns twist up mountainsides and plunge back down to valleys far below.

Sometimes we felt like we were the only people in the Pamirs, driving in solitude and rarely passing another vehicle.

Best of all, there’s the sense of total freedom that comes with having your own car…to just, you know, drive around Tajikistan.

When you take each day as it comes, every one of them is a potential adventure.

High-Altitude Passes

There’s no other way to get through all those mountains. A blizzard on Khargush Pass nearly forced us to turn back. Blinding snow accumulated on the narrow road, whiting out my view of the sheer drop on the right side as we inched along.

At 4,655 metres, Ak-Baital is the highest pass on the trip, and one of the most desolate places we ventured through.

The altitude here also really took a toll on our snacks.

And then there’s Kyzyl-Art pass, the remote mountain border where we left Tajikistan behind and crossed into Kyrgyzstan.

Borders

Mountains and rivers make good borders. Good borders with Afghanistan, to be exact.

As the owner at our homestay said to us one evening, ‘The Pamirs are safe. The war is over there.’ He pointed out the window at Afghanistan on the other side of the valley.

A narrow river forms the Afghan border and the road trails it for days, right past busy villages and a mountainside track running parallel to our own. At times we were no more than 50 meters from the other side – it’s a bit surreal.

And once we ran out of Afghan border, the road followed an endless barbed wire fence demarcating the neutral zone between Tajikistan and China.

Checkpoints

This part of Tajikistan is called Gorno-Badakhshan, and it’s a separate region with its own entry requirements. That means there are military checkpoints here and there. We’d read that soldiers at these checkpoints could sometimes be problematic (read: demand bribes) but we didn’t encounter a single issue. Sometimes they just waved us right through without even looking at our documents; other times they stopped us only to make sure we were fine. The most ‘harassment’ we ever faced was a few guards who wouldn’t let us past until we’d stopped for chai.

Remote Villages

When I say remote I mean…seriously remote. It’s hard to believe sometimes but – people live here. We’d drive for hours without signs of life and then pass a village that wasn’t much more than a scattering of rusty shipping containers on a bleak, windswept plain. Maybe a few yaks wandering the streets.

The exception to this desolate emptiness is the Wakhan valley (which is actually a detour off the highway), where there is a string of friendly villages. Locals get around either by very sporadic public transport in the form of shared jeeps, or by hitchhiking. We picked up as many hitchers as we could fit in the car on this leg of the journey.

These kids were our favourite passengers. We picked them up basically on the top of a cliff, and drove them down to their village below.

They didn’t have much English but they did know ‘car’, ‘brake’ and ‘stop’, which I took to be critiques of Oyv’s driving on the steep descent.

Every village has a homestay or two where guests can sleep for the night – Pamiri-style, on mattresses in a big room with a central oven, under thick, heavy blankets.

Our homestay hosts also fed us dinner and breakfast, and the chai-supply is endless.

Petrol is pretty easy to come by too.

History

People not only live here today – they’ve been here for a while. The Wakhan valley was once a part of the Silk Road and it is still dotted with shrines, tombs, stupas, and the ruins of ancient fortresses. Built as far back as the 3rd century BC to protect traders on the road, some of these forts have been put to use by one culture after another, most recently serving as military watchposts during Tajikistan’s civil war in the 1990s. Today they offer the opportunity to climb up and scramble around tumbledown castles in the middle of nowhere, often all alone (so don’t fall).

The best preserved is Yamchun Fortress, where despite centuries of earthquakes and landslides, the ruins cling to a lonely hilltop overlooking Afghanistan. We climbed up onto the crumbling walls and looked out over the valley – time seems to stand still here.

…And Back to Reality (Osh)

After eight days exploring along the Pamir Highway we reached the end of the road, in Osh, Kyrgyzstan. It was hot and sunny there and we desperately needed to change out of our long underwear and peel off some of the layers we’d been wearing non-stop in the chilly mountains. We parked the car at a cafe – by day three of nothing but Nescafe we’d started fantasizing about coffee. So we drank lattes in the cafe – instead of instant coffee on a sandy riverbank looking into Afghanistan, or on the shores of an alpine lake, or beside an empty road stretching forever into the distance. It was good coffee but there’s definitely something to be said for a cup of Nescafe on an epic roadtrip.

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Want to know how we pulled this trip off? Take a look at our guide to self-driving the Pamir Highway for our trip itinerary and important practical details.

The post An Epic Road Trip: Adventures on the Pamir Highway appeared first on WhirledAway.

When we finally came rattling over the border from Mozambique into South Africa in a crappy old minibus as usual, we hadn’t thought much about what we would find in this next country. We climbed out and struggled, as usual, to extricate our backpacks from the cramped vehicle and wrestle them onto our shoulders. Brushing sand and biscuit crumbs off of our sweaty, disheveled clothes and absent-mindedly scratching our bug bites, we looked up and realised we were back in ‘The West’. To be precise, we were standing in a shopping mall parking lot. We shivered as a blast of cold air from KFC ruffled Oyv’s overgrown hair which has turned into a long curly mullet. I glanced down at my dirty feet and then looked around for a day spa. Shoppers strolled by pushing trolleys piled with grocery bags. People went about their lives in a way that looked totally familiar to us.

At first it felt like we weren’t in Africa anymore. People who’ve been to South Africa – even people from South Africa – had all referred to this country as a ‘fake’ version of Africa. An easy introduction to the continent for novices. But we came here for two reasons: to finish our journey down through Africa from north to south, and to finish it in style at the end of three months on the road. We knew all about the picturesque small towns, fantastic food, sophisticated Cape Town and of course – the world-famous wine lands.

So in a way, we started to feel like we’d gone home and come back again on another separate holiday – a trip within a trip.

But as it turns out, we weren’t out of Africa just yet.

We decided to drive all the way down to Cape Town, stopping along the way wherever we felt like it.

So we hired a car and off we went, windows rolled up and doors locked. This is South Africa, after all, and we’ve heard one too many carjacking stories.

We’ve all heard a lot about crime in South Africa, of course. Everybody has fences and gates and alarms and dogs. Back in Inhambane, we had dinner with a couple from Jo’burg who were so disgusted with the situation in South Africa that they retreated to the remote Mozambican bush and took up farming, only emerging into civilisation once every six months or so.

Anyway, first we went on safari in Kruger National Park. This wildlife reserve is bigger than some entire countries in Europe. We spent three days game driving in this enormous park, both of us spotting rampant wildlife out the windows.

Along with all the usual suspects (giraffes, zebras, bushbuck, impalas, warthogs….) we also saw plenty of four of the ‘Big Five’: rhinos, buffalos, elephants and lions.

We didn’t see the fifth and very elusive member of this elite group, the leopard.

We camped in safari tents at night, and did all our cooking on the braai (barbeque).

Early one morning we went on a bush walk with two armed rangers. On foot like this, you don’t see the big game you’ll see when driving. But instead you see the park’s perhaps even more terrifying inhabitants:

Leaving the wilds, we carried on to St. Lucia, a touristy town of beaches and cafes. We drove out to the beach at Cape Vidal.

Although we will now zip right past a herd of zebras (Sar: ‘They’re just like fat ponies.’) or impalas (Oyv: ‘I’m sick of impalas’) a group of rhinos snorting in the grass will always bring us to a dead halt.

Then we inch forward, turn off the engine and watch them. We’re lucky to see them at all: the Black Rhino has been poached nearly to extinction by trophy hunters and others in pursuit of the animal’s valuable horn.

The St. Lucia estuary is home to about two dozen crocodiles and a thousand hippos.

We went hippo-spotting on the river:

As it turns out, the tales of hippos roaming the streets of town are actually true. We’d heard about this but assumed it was one of those stories for foreigners like polar bears wondering freely in urban areas in more wintery countries.

We were walking home in the dark after dinner when Oyv suddenly grabbed my arm and whispered ‘there’s a hippo straight ahead.’ He had already done this twice and in both cases the hippo had turned out to be a person carrying a large basket so I wasn’t very worried. But then we saw them: three hippos grazing on the manicured lawn of a B&B.

We froze, then walked backwards and had a whispered argument about what to do next. Our guesthouse owner had mentioned in passing that a hippo had bitten off a local’s leg. As always happens on safari when you spot game: vehicles appear. A man driving a 4×4 pickup stopped beside the hippos so we decided to creep forward quietly and put the truck between ourselves and these second-most dangerous animals in Africa, who were noisily chomping on the hedges and didn’t seem interested in any of our legs at all.

And let’s not forget the Boers: a group descended from German, French and Dutch settlers and speaking their own language, Afrikaans. Living in the Cape Colony, they grew tried of both the European colonial powers and the local people so in the 1830s they famously trekked right off into the interior. There they established their own autonomous republic and engaged the British twice in the Anglo-Boer wars. Losing the second war, the Boer’s Free State ended up as a British colony after all and today is just another part of the united South Africa.

We stayed in a cabin on a farm in Boer country.

The farm has been in the same family for 5 generations – in other words, ever since the Boers first arrived here.

Apparently the original founder fought for this land and although he never actually paid any money for it, it was ‘paid for in blood’ as his great great nephew shared with us over breakfast.

We wanted to learn some more about life in South Africa first-hand. Mom had given us the contact details for some of the missionaries connected to her work. Two of them live with their kids in Amanzimtoti, near Durban. We drove down the coast and met Kerry there at her house.

Kerry works for an NGO (Non Governmental Organisation) called Seed of Hope. She and her colleague Nicole showed us around the Township they work in. Today the inhabitants of these apartheid-era remnants are free to come and go, but those who live in a Township have few prospects and are dependent on government grants.

Unemployment in this one hovers at around 80%. Infrastructure and public services are almost non-existent – most homes don’t even have indoor plumbing. HIV is a serious problem and yet still a taboo subject – Kerry told us of a vice principal at the local school who wasted away and died, quite obviously of AIDS, rather than admit to having the disease and take the free, life-saving drugs. Struggling with limited funds and empty pantries, some families can only manage to feed their kids one meal a day.

As the focus of their community development program, Seed of Hope teaches sustainable, productive farming techniques to anyone who wants to learn.

The idea is to build and encourage food self-reliance and so lift families out of poverty. Together with this they offer counselling and support to individuals and families in crisis. Their office building houses an after-school activity program for local kids. They believe that education, rather than more donations and quick fixes, is the key to a permanent change.

We ate dinner at a lovely restaurant on Durban’s beautiful waterfront with Kerry, Nicole and Kerry’s teenage son. Kerry reminded us that although things look good on the surface here and we can be lulled into complacency, life in South Africa is not always quite as comfortable and ‘ordinary’ as it might seem when you first arrive on a crappy minibus from Mozambique and look around at the fancy restaurants and familiar shopping malls.

And now, 3809 kilometers of perfect highways and bumpy country lanes and twisting mountain roads later, we’re closing in on Cape Town.

We’re 81 kilometers away and we aren’t ready to end this trip-within-a-trip yet, so we’re taking a hiatus in Franschhoek at the heart of South Africa’s beautiful wine lands.

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Check out the rest of my stories, for more of our adventures (and misadventures) on the road from Cairo to Cape Town.

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