Trip details

Here's the rough itinerary of our travels. Follow along the red dotted line on the map!

We'll arrive in Windhoek, Namibia on May 20th. We're renting a car for two weeks in Namibia and plan to visit several national parks. We'll go to Sossusvlei in the south, to the Skeleton coast in the west, and then Etosha National Park in the north of the country. We may see if we can take a hiking trip in the Fish River Canyon, (second-largest canyon in the world after the Grand Canyon) in the very south of the country at some point.

Then we'll cross into Botswana where we'll visit the Okavango Delta and rent a four-wheel drive jeep to explore the salt flats near Maun. From there we'll head north to the Botswana/Zambia/Zimbabwe border and visit Victoria Falls.

Next it's on to Lusaka, Zambia, via bus and towards Malawi, hopefully spending a few days in the parks alongside Lake Malawi.

Towards the end of June we plan to cross into Tanzania and in early July we hope to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro. Following that, we'll spend some time in the Ngorogoro crater, then do a four-day hike across the Serengeti Plain.

Then we'll take a short beach holiday in Zanzibar, off the coast of Tanzania, before hopping across the border into Kenya. Our main goal in Kenya will be to climb Mt. Kenya, the second-highest mountain on the continent, after Kilimanjaro.

From there, we'll cross into Uganda, where we'll take a multi-day hike in the Mt. Elgon region, hopefully climbing that mountain. We'll cross to the western side of Uganda to visit a couple of national parks, and hopefully have the opportunity to see some mountain gorillas.

Finally, we'll bus it back to Nairobi, Kenya, and another mini-beach holiday near Mombasa, before returning to Nairobi and flying home via London at the end of August.

Phew! As I said, that's the current plan, but who knows where we'll end up! So often we meet people who rave about a place not to be missed or we read about somewhere off the beaten path and we alter course to visit it. We have twice planned, as part of 2 previous trips to South East Asia, travels down the east coast of Malaysia but have still yet to visit it! The first time we had unwhittingly planned to travel that way during the monsoon season and arrived to find everything closed for the season and hardly the sunny weather we had expected. The second attempt we got as far as an island off the coast for a few days rest on a beach but landed up staying on the beach for 2 weeks it was so nice and forwent the east coast trip yet again!