Route planning is happening at the moment. As it stands we expect to leave at the very early October with the main target to be in Gondar in northern Ethiopia by mid-December. We are being careful not to be too specific about dates because Africa being Africa nothing is predictable, however we hope to complete our hike up Kilamanjaro in late January and arrive in Die Hel/Cape Town around mid March. Then we shall give the Landy a whole lotta love at the half way point before heading north and aiming to be home by mid August 2010.

 The terribly scary task of budgeting has also happened recently. I say scary because when we got round to putting every piece of kit and paperwork down in a list with prices we ended up with a total cost of £25, 000 – slightly more than our original budget of £15, 000! A realistic figure is probably between the two, but it is infuriatingly difficult predicting living expenses when fuel consumption can change massively depending on the terrain and fuel & food prices can double with crossing a border or entering certain regions.

We met Matt Stockdale and Dr Kassahun from Gondar the other day, making lots of nice plans for the project we want to run whilst in Gondar over the Christmas period. Still being finalised but we shall explain all soon.

 Spending this weekend fixing bits on the car. The alarm went off at 6am a couple of mornings ago undoubtedly waking the whole neighbourhood so many apologies for that! Exhaust is now changed and today we want to tackle some of the various electrical problems such as the plethora of lights at the back which don’t work as well as the rear windscreen wiper.

Will put some pics up soon to show how we got on.

 Ciao for now