Carnet Du Passage
Without one you won't be going anywhere! A Carnet is issued by a motoring organisation allowing temporary importation of a vehicle into certain countries without payment of customs duties and taxes. The RAC are the only motoring organisation in the UK that issues a carnet.
International Driving Permit
An IDP is internationally recognised and normally allows the holder to drive a private motor vehicle without additional formality. We will get ours issued from the RAC – bear in mind that they are only valid for a year.
Green Card
This will be obtained from Elephant.co.uk as we have used them to take out our Land Rover insurance here in the UK.
EHIC Card
The European Health Insurance Card entitles UK residents who are travelling abroad to reduced cost, or sometimes free, medical treatment in a number of European countries.
Camping Card International
The Camping Card International is a useful document to carry if you are camping abroad. It can be used as a form of identity and is accepted by many campsite proprietors as security in lieu of a passport and can also offer you discounts on presentation of the card.
Vehicle Insurance
Its expensive but we feel its a must. We are taking out a policy with Campbell Irvine - they are basically the only company based in the UK who will cover us in Africa.
Travel Insurance
We are going to take out travel insurance with World Nomads.
Maps & Books
We have bought a lot of Lonely Planets and Michelin maps over the passed few months. Even though we have a GPS you can never rely on technology and for language reasons you want to make sure you have a couple of English paper maps to hand in the event that the GPS does let you down. We aim to use the Lonely Planet books to help guide us to campsites as well as the must see sites.
Business Cards & Licence ID's
We have printed very simple business cards which have our email address, website URL and a photo of us on it. These will be very useful to give to people we meet on the road. We are also going to laminate a few copies of our driver’s licences which can be given to people as a form of ID (rather than them have the original).
Stickers
Jo Shaw at Premier Signs designed us some exterior stickers for our Land Rover. We had a map made of our route as this will be a great talking point when we meet local people along the way because we can show them exactly where we have come from and where we are going to.
Visas
We will travel on our British passports until Turkey and then swap onto our South African passports for the rest of the adventure. On South African passports we will still have to obtain visas for some countries.
Before departure we will get visas for the following countries:
- Turkey
You have to apply in person
- Syria
£25 for South African's, can be done by post and takes about 4 working days.
- Jordan
Free for South African's, can be done by post and takes about 3 working days.
You can obtain the visa on arrival.
- Egypt
Free for South African's, can be done by post and takes about 5 working days.
- Ethiopia
Costs £24 for South African's, can be done by post and takes about 5 working days.
We will get our visa for Sudan in Cairo (Egypt) and all other visas needed we are able to get on arrival at border posts.
Passports
Make sure your passport is valid still for a few more years and that it has enough spare double pages for any visas you might need to get on the way. It is advisable to carry a stash of ID photos on you. ID photo's cost a lot so I scanned in an ID photo, pasted as many as I could onto and A4 page and printed them off on photo paper.
Bank
We will notify our UK and RSA banks of our adventure and the countries we will be travelling in so they don’t think our cards have been stolen if they are suddenly used in the middle of Africa. We have also arranged for the bank to give us a couple of forms that one would need to complete in the event that one of us has fraud on our cards or bank account – you just never know when it will happen and we don’t want to be passed on from person to person when we are calling from a Sat phone.
Contacts book & Receipts of things bought
We have made a little book of contacts which contains every single possible contact we might need - email address's, fax numbers, telephone numbers, cell phone numbers ....
We have also made a file of receipts of everything we have bought so if we are asked at borders where we got things (medical drugs etc) we can prove that we bough them and haven't stolen them!
Copies
Take copies of everything and nominate someone responsible to have a copy in case of an emergency. We will hide copies around the vehicle in case originals get stolen and even email copies of important documents to our web mail account.
We will also write down all the serial numbers of the gadgets we take with us.
Info Page
We have been told to put together an A4 page of all our details (passport number, DOB, Nationality etc) as when you are stopped at security checks along the roads this will help save time filling in their forms wanting the same info as what will be on our sheet.
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