First things first: there is no single figure. What it costs depends on how you travel and what you expect. How often you eat out, what you buy, where you sleep, how often you take a hotel and, above all, which vehicle you choose, all of that is yours to decide. But some items come out much the same for everyone, fuel and visas among them. If you read up beforehand, you can work out a realistic budget of your own. Here is what we spent our money on over 140 days from Hamburg to Cape Town.
Our Land Cruiser at 4x4 CI in Abidjan.
By far the biggest variable is the vehicle, and the gap between two options is easily tens of thousands of euros. A solid, reliable third-hand 4x4 gets you to Cape Town just as well as a fully built expedition truck, which in extreme cases runs close to a million. Yes, we saw that too. We met a surprising range of transport along the way: an old BMW 5 Series with no four wheel drive, a Toyota Yaris, even a Reliant Robin (worth a search) and a 40 year old 49 cc moped. More expensive is not automatically better, and choosing a vehicle is a very personal decision.
What we would recommend is set out in full in the guide. Our own choice was a 1991 Toyota Land Cruiser 80, and we were very happy with it. The vehicle is almost always the largest single block of the budget, unless you are going by bicycle. :)
Whatever your style of travel, some costs come with the route itself.
Diesel. Over 23,000 kilometres it is a large item, and the price swings enormously. In Western Sahara, Nigeria or Angola it is very cheap in places, in most other countries it sits at a stable level, and it is always cheaper than in Europe. What decides the total is your vehicle's consumption. We used around 14 litres per 100 kilometres, which made diesel our single biggest cost of the whole trip.
Visas. They follow no single system in Africa, and prices vary a lot, even for the same country. The visa for DR Congo costs 250 US dollars at one embassy and around 75 euros at another. Across the whole route that adds up noticeably. What matters for the budget: choose the cheaper embassy for each visa, and take standard processing rather than express where you can, since express usually costs around 30 per cent more. It kept us below what most other travellers paid. The full overview, with prices, processing times and our recommendation on where to apply for which visa, is in the appendix of the guide.
Travel medical insurance. Not optional, in our view. It costs relatively little and saves several thousand euros if something happens. German statutory health insurance covers little outside Europe and usually nothing at all for repatriation, which is exactly the part that can become extremely expensive. Measured against the risk, it is the easiest expense on the whole trip to justify.
The Carnet de Passages en Douane is the passport for your vehicle, the central customs document of the trip. Issued through the ADAC (the German motoring club) it carries a fee, and above all a deposit, which is based on the value of the vehicle and can be high. You get the deposit back, but it has to be available in the meantime. Some travellers use cheaper providers abroad, in the Czech Republic or Switzerland for instance.
Possible one-off fees. One example is the well known 250 euro Senegal charge for vehicles over eight years old entering without a carnet. Some of these can be avoided if you are prepared, but you should know they exist. Add to that the ferry from Europe to Morocco, and getting yourselves and your vehicle back from Cape Town to Europe.
We pull over on the main road and do our shopping at the market in Guinea.
This is where your style of travel decides, and where you have the most control.
Food can be very cheap if you buy at local markets and cook yourself, which is what most days look like anyway. Eat out often, especially in the cities, and buy a lot in international supermarkets, and it gets expensive quickly. Many of the European products we are used to cost considerably more in Africa than at home.
Camp spots on this route are often free, and camping free is usually possible. Take a paid campsite or a room for the shower more often and you pay more here. We took the middle way: hotels in some cities, the odd campsite in Namibia, but wild camping most of the time.
Repairs and the unforeseen. How many garage visits you should budget for depends on you and above all on your vehicle, a few oil changes will happen in any case. Then there is the genuinely unforeseen, which in our case included a trip to the vet.
Other. Smaller items such as shopping, entrance fees and activities, internet and laundry. We have broken those down individually in the guide too.
Separate the purchase (vehicle and build) from the travel costs (everything on the road) and work them out apart from each other. The purchase is your big decision and it is settled before you leave. Here are our travel costs alone, for two people and a dog, over five months:
That works out at just under 110 euros a day for two people and a dog. We see our costs as the middle way. We wild camped most of the time and usually cooked ourselves, but we also spent several nights in hotels in Morocco and Dakar and were glad of the restaurants in the larger cities. You can travel considerably cheaper by camping free throughout and skipping restaurants. It can just as easily become more expensive if you sleep in hotels more often, or in better ones.
And one rule holds: the longer you are on the road, the lower your spend per day, because fixed costs like visas and the carnet spread over more days. In the guide we set out every single item, with the real amounts we paid.
The vehicle and its build. Between a used 4x4 and an expedition truck there are easily tens of thousands of euros. Everything else is smaller and easier to plan.
Around 15,500 euros for two people and a dog over five months, not counting the vehicle itself. That is just under 110 euros a day. The largest running item was diesel.
Yes, above all through the vehicle. Beyond that you save by camping free a lot, cooking yourself, and being strategic about fuel and visas.
The Carnet de Passages (a fee plus a refundable deposit), visas for most countries, travel medical insurance, and individual one-off charges such as the ferry from Europe to Morocco. The full list with amounts is in the guide.
In the guide you will find the full cost breakdown: vehicle and build, the visa overview with our recommendation on where each visa is cheapest to apply for, carnet, insurance and all the running costs on the road. Enough to build your own budget on real numbers instead of estimates. And if you would rather go through it in conversation, that is what the consulting is for.