Thread: African Safari - in a Defender!

No but I;m of the impression that local knowledg goes a long way as far as avoiding trouble is concerned... it's soemthign to keep in mind.

Ranga you may want topost in the off topic section over on AHN as there are a few south africans and people who;ve been over there who can probably offer advice. Just make sure you make it clear you are shooting photos not with rifles - or you'll get all sorts of good but useless advice.

Ranga, there are a fair number of tour operators and 4x4 rental firms that service the southern Africa region.
As in all things, independent testimonies are important: I wouldn't want you to be ripped off.

Give me an idea the areas you would like to travel through, and I can ask our local gurus to provide some tips and advice?

Hi Ranga,
The Wife & I did the self hire trip in 2007 & rented a 4wd camper called a Trax (Hilux chassis) it worked out to be around 800 rand per day for 40 days hire. The vehicle was great for sleeping & cooking in & much better than the rooftop tent option (we have one on our Disco in Oz). We rented through an agent of Britz called Campers corner in Joburg, the vehicle we got was brand new with only 200k on the clock, only downsides is the Hilux did not have much clearance but got us through 10,300km ok with some grading on some of the real rutted sandy tracks. We did S.Africa, Namibia, Botwana & Mozambique & went to some pretty remote spots along the way, our favourites spots were Namibia & the Caprivi strip where the reserves were really wild & no fences to protect you at night. I would highly recommend the Tracks4Africa maps (Tracks4Africa - Mapping Africa, one day at a time) for remote travel in Africa, they are put together by the SA 4WD community & regularly updated. You can install them on a PDA with GPS, no speech but very useful when the track across a huge salt pan suddenly branches off in several different directions with no signs, its basically a moving map but has lots of places of interest like Hippo pools that you would normally drive past. The maps for each region were only $14 a piece or around $100 for the entire continent when we went.
Cheers
Mark

Thanks for the advice. It appears it may be much cheaper to hire my own vehicle and build my own itinerary. This is how we did it in SE Asia. All the tour operators really provided was information, accommodation and travel that could easily be arranged yourself with a little effort. For this, they charged about 4 times the cost of doing it yourself.

I'll start mulling it over and see what I come up with.