Some tips for other overlanders

• You´ll always get the most updated information from other travelers you meet on the road.
• Don´t plan too much. Be able to change your plans day by day.
• We bought some Tracks4Africa paper maps for Botswana and Namibia, which was nice to have. But mainly we used MapsMe on our iPad or searched for camp spots in the Tracks4Africa iPad version which was s a bit poor but helped a lot when we were late and still had no plan where to stay.
• Guide books are nice to have and you should take them from home as they are hard to get on the road. Anyhow we were lucky and got the East Africa Lonely Planet from other travelers. In some places the Lonely Planet is more for backpackers. We even had all lonely planet guides on the laptop but didn´t want to take it out when hundreds of people surrounded us.
• Next time we would bring a second passport. It makes it easier to send one home for a visa you can´t get from where you are.
• If you like you can bring copies of all your documents and a pile of passport pictures which will shorten the time at embassies or borders. We often didn´t have all these documents ready, but if you prepare yourself mentally for the border crossing and see it as a part of the adventure, you´ll manage. Why should you rush?
• Much better are scans of your documents as backup, sent to your own email account. You will find email access in nearly all.
• Apart of that we brought about 20 copies of a one pager “contact details”/ “Les coordonnées” with all information about us, the car etc. which was worth ones` weight in gold as all police controls in Morocco and Mauretania asked for “Affish” and were satisfied with this piece of paper (I will add an example). If you don´t have it you just have to repeat all these questions a hundred times.
• We regret that we didn´t stop longer at some places (the longest was 2 weeks and that because of waiting for the visas.)