My Travel Plans: Overland from Cape Town to Cairo

Just a quick update on my travel plans. I spent two months in Cape Town and then traveled all the way to Johannesburg by Baz Bus. I visited the following places along the way: Wilderness, Knysna, Plettenberg Bay, Bloukrans Bridge (where I jumped the world’s highest bridge bungee jump!), Tsitsikamma National Park, Jeffrey’s Bay, Port Elizabeth, Hogsback, Coffee Bay, Southern Drakensberg, Lesotho, Warner Beach (and Umkomaas for scuba diving), Durban, Northern Drakensberg and finally Johannesburg. I’ll write more about my South African travels later.

It was a month full of traveling, and I was in kind of on a tight schedule because my South African visa was about to expire. I had planned to travel directly to Swaziland from Johannesburg, but I spontaneously booked a flight to Mauritius. I’ve been secretly searching the flight prices the whole time I’ve been in South Africa, and Johannesburg seemed to offer the cheapest connections.

So right now, I’m in Mauritius and this Friday I’m flying back to Johannesburg. I’m not planning to stay in South Africa anymore (I don’t even know what kind of visa I would get, probably just a transit visa because I’ve already used the 3-month tourist visa). So my plan is to find a direct bus to Swaziland and hopefully continue there on the same or next day.

After Swaziland, I only have a rough travel plan, but my goal is to travel overland all the way to Cairo, Egypt. I have no idea how long this is going to take, but probably at least five months. I’ve previously done an overland trip from Nairobi to Cape Town, and that took me three months. I’m hoping to get back to Europe before it’s getting too cold again so that I could visit the six countries I have left there. Last year, my plan to visit Moldova, Romania, and Belarus failed when it was getting too cold in November, and I decided to skip those countries.

So the plan after Swaziland is to visit these countries: Mozambique, Tanzania, Burundi, Rwanda, DR Congo, Uganda, South Sudan, Ethiopia, Somaliland, Djibouti, Sudan and Egypt. From Egypt, I’ll fly to Eritrea because traveling there overland is almost an impossible task. I’ll also need to fly to South Sudan because the country is in civil war and taking a bus from Uganda to Juba, the capital of South Sudan, would be like committing suicide. It’s extremely dangerous, and people are getting killed there on a daily basis. Juba is one of the safest places to visit in the country, and that’s where I will go. I wouldn’t recommend people traveling to South Sudan right now, but because, as most of you know, I’m on a quest to visit every country in the world, I won’t skip countries and wait for better days to come.

Two years ago I did a backpacking trip from Nairobi to Cape Town, and I visited these countries: Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Namibia and South Africa. So this time around only South Africa and Tanzania are countries where I’ve been before. I’m so excited to see new countries in Africa!

I haven’t applied for any visas yet, and I plan to do that on the road. I’m hoping that it’s not going to be a problem. The first country I need a visa is Burundi, so I might get stuck in Dar es Salaam for a while as I’ve heard the visa process may take up to two weeks. Eritrea is supposed to be one of the hardest countries in the world to get a visa, but I’ve already made some contacts there, and they will organize a visa for me so that I can just pick it up from the airport.

What could possibly go wrong?