Experience the beauty of the Sahara Desert & West Africa in this mid-length adventure overland from Gibraltar to Accra.
Week 1 - 4: Europe, Morocco, Mauritania
We start the trip at Gibraltar. Crossing the straits of Gibraltar to Morocco, we visit the coastal capital city of Rabat and visit Casablanca.Meknes, on the high plains is of the many ancient walled cities with covered markets and a labyrinth of narrow winding streets. We visit the ancient Roman ruin of Volubilis, followed by Fes, Marrakech and the Atlas Mountains. We pass into the Sahara Desert and follow the Atlantic Coast - it is never forgotten; oases with cool water surrounded by palms, stretches of sand as big as a small country, old forts, camel trains following centuries old trading routes, and a night sky undiluted by city lights. We go hundreds of miles off road, sometimes digging the truck out of the soft sands to get through.
Week 5 - 10: Mali, Burkina Faso, Ghana
We enter the Sahel; the vast semi arid desert that separates the Sahara from the forests of black Africa and follow the Niger River, visiting the old mud towns of Mopti & Djenne. On the Bandiagara escarpment we trek to the small villages of the Dogon. Burkina Faso is famous for its beautiful lost wax bronze statues. In Ghana we cross the jungle to the beaches of the Gold Coast and visit the slaving forts.
The important bit
Our Expedition trips are different from our other departures and other holidays you may have taken – we go through areas where no tourists go, the roads can be bad, food can be limited to what we have stocked on the truck, campsites are few and basic, visas can be hard to get and communication to the outside world limited or unavailable at times. We guarantee; we’ll break down, that we will have to wait some where we don’t really want to be for visas spare parts or just for someone to open a closed road and we’ll have to dig the truck out of mud and sand.
The trip might overrun so finish late; the route can change due to rains, closed roads visa issues, breakdowns and politics. It’s best not to book your return flights home until you finish the trip.
To join this trip you need to be prepared to work as part of a team and to share with the others on the trip. Some of the things you’ll never forget are the satisfaction of getting a 16 ton truck unstuck, cooking over open fires after collecting the firewood, pitching a tent and getting it right even when it rains, going to sleep when its dark and waking at dawn and wanting to get out of your sleeping bag to start another day in which you have no idea of what will happen, washing in rivers, not washing and not caring that your dirty, living out side for months, seeing more than you have ever before, trying to learn French Arabic or Swahili and having people understand what you say, finding out just how far places are away from where you started and how different places can be and how unaffected out of the way places are from the world we normally live in. Most people who do an expedition find it a lot of fun though of course hard at times.