The Plan

Our original plan was to say the least ambitious. We planned to take six months off work and travel overland to Kenya.

Although we have travelled a great deal in Morocco and the north, we have never been to Mauritania & Mali, both countries have been on our must visit list for a long time, as both offer some great off-road tracks and interesting sights. A friend who works for us at home is from Burkina Faso, another country that we know very little about, but were keen to explore. It also gave us the opportunity to stay with a local family and experience their way of life.

So our idea was to travel from our home in Rome to Morocco, then follow the west coast down to Senegal and the Gambia before crossing over to East Africa and eventually Kenya. We always travel with an open mind and try to remain flexible with our plans. So decided not to apply for visas before we left, but to get them along the way as required.

In the end it became obvious, once we were in Africa, that it was going to be difficult, if not impossible to take the route we had planned, due to border closures, political unrest and civil wars. Even if we could find a route through, we certinally would not have had sufficient time to get to Kenya. So in the end we decided to change our plans and travel through West Africa, visiting as many countries as we could. Kenya would have to wait for another year.

Many things can happen on an overland journey, and in the end we met some great people who were also overlanding through West Africa. With them we travelled well off the beaten track to places it would not have been easy to go on our own. Our original plans may have been scrapped but in the end we had a great trip, a journey we shall always remember.