Sand Lover - Trip Preparations

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Slideshows:

Click for map of carnet requirement in Africa

The Medical Stuff?

Vaccinations:

We did all our vaccines at our local GP. These prickly things are not much fun, but here goes:

The NHS covers the costs of all diseases that are contractible in the UK:.

•Typhoid (We both managed to contract this in Ethiopia)
•Meningitis
•Hepatitis A
•Diphtheria /Tetanus/Polio

The following need paying for:

•Hepatitis B (in three doses)
•Yellow Fever
•Rabies (This vaccine is not required but is highly advisable. It’ll give you 24 hours to seek treatment if bitten by a rabid animal as opposed to 1 hour.)

Malaria tablets:

We went to Trailfinders in High Street Kensington. They are a very friendly and amazingly did not charge a consultation fee. They explained thoroughly what different drugs were available. We settled for Doxycyline buying enough for the first month or so of the journey re-stocking in most chemists in West Africa is a gazillion times cheaper (24 tablets in the UK = £20 vs. 50 tablets for £2 in Gabon for the same stuff made in Switzerland. You do the math). We also bought Malaria test kits in Africa or about £1 each!

We also purchased a single dose of Malarone as an emergency treatment should one of us contract Malaria. But it would be even better to wait till you get to Africa and purchase Coratem.

Needless to say, we never contracted malaria and taking precautions: Mozzie repellant, long sleeves, closed shoes, etc... is the best preventative.

We only took our preventative in in the worst affected areas.

Passports & Visas:

Andrew to get a new 64 page British Passport

Kristina will travel on a combination of a Canadian and a Swiss Passports

Visa requirements click on passports to enlarge

Visas will be mostly obtained en-route. Organising all the visas from London can be hugely expensive and also means that you have a schedule that constricts your movements. ie. having to enter/exit this or that country by this or that date.

Some countries require letters of invitation to secure Visas, these will be organised both from London and en-route. By the end of the trip our passports were so full that we had to get officials to stamp over previous visas, had to peel off old visas and generally manipulate the passport in ways that we shouldn’t have. It’s worth keeping an eye on the officials and make sure they stamp your passport economically.

Insurance:

Vehicle insurance: Our UK insurance only covers us within the boundaries of the European Union (and Morocco). No insurance company will insure us, especially for such an old vehicle outside of Europe. A third party only insurance is available and usually compulsory at border crossings.

Purchase a

combined Carte Brune and AXA insurance in Senegal for all ECOWAS and CEMAC member countries.

Personal Insurance: Travel and medical insurance for this kind of expeditions are pretty hard to come by and the premiums can be hugely expensive. After careful deliberation and comparing various policies we have gone with Navigator Travel Insurance.

International Driving License (IDP):

They can be obtained from the post office in the UK. Not compulsory but can help border formalities was only asked for once in Nigeria and once for the application of an Angolan visa

Carnet de Passage

The Carnet de Passages en Douane (CPD) is a customs document that identifies a driver's motor vehicle. It is required in order to take a vehicle into a number of countries around the world.

The Carnet allows travellers to temporarily import their vehicles without having to leave a cash deposit at the border. It is, in essence, an international guarantee for payment of customs duties and taxes to a government should the vehicle not be re-exported from that country.

In order to obtain a Carnet, the owner of a vehicle is required to provide a security based on the age and market value of the vehicle. Generally three types of security are acceptable from motoring organisations: a cash bond, a banker's letter of indemnity or an Insurance policy.

We have gone for the latter: Cash deposit. We declared the value of the car as £1000 which is apparently the minimum. So with help of relatives who have agreed to put the cash deposit on our behalf, this saved us money on any extras. The Total fee for this was £190, excluding the refundable deposit.

V5 Document:

The V5 registration document, is issued by the DVLA. It gives the name and address of a vehicle's current owner as well as the last two registered keepers. It also lists the car's colour, make, model, engine number, and vehicle identification number. We made a colour copy of ours and laminated it as it is handled so many times that the original paper one would have vaporised.

MOT:

An up to date MOT certificate is apparently required legally, although it will expire during the duration of our trip.

SORN:

We’ll declare the car as SORN and get any remaining road tax refunded.

The documents?