Our map of Africa and more
Ah…the fabulous stories that a detailed map could tell, like this one of our travels through Lesotho
Julie and I are heavily into maps. I’ve got boxes and boxes full of maps gathering dust up in our attic. City maps, country maps, continent maps, walking maps, driving maps, topographical maps, national park maps, the list goes on. And these are just the paper maps – when you include all our map apps, GPS tracking and mapping tools the whole thing is kinda crazy. One of my favourite reads over the last few years was a thick tome on the history of maps. So of course when it comes to Africa – we mapped it!
I use a couple different tools to map our Follow the Sun travels – one is called Scribble Maps, which is good for mapping our intended travel freehand, and the other is Tripline. Tripline is a free application that allows me to pinpoint our exact movements. Or nearly exact, there have been a few occasions where we’ve followed a four wheel drive track that is not on their maps and then I have to manually put in our path.
Using Scribble Maps this is how I drew up our rough intended travel plans in southern Africa.
Starting in Durban and running counter-clockwise, this is the rough plan we had for travelling around southern Africa
Using Tripline this is a high level view of exactly where we went during our three months in southern Africa.
As you can see if you compare the maps, we more or less followed our rough intended route in southern Africa
If you want to drill down into this map to see where we travelled more specifically you can go here – Southern Africa
Our Follow the Sun journey has now covered four continents and created a lifetime of fabulous experiences and memories for Julie and I. Here’s a quick look at our travels across North America, Central and South America and Europe.
We spent seven months travelling around North America and we’ve got big plans to see much more in follow up visits
We covered a lot of ground in North America and for more details you can drill down here – North America
Our highlights in Central America would be Christmas on a beach in Baja California, our detour to Cuba and many wonderful surprises in Guatemala and Costa Rica. For more detail of our travels in Central America you can have a look here – Central America
Our travels in South America mainly followed the Andes Mountains from Colombia down to the southern tip of the continent and then back up the east coast to Montevideo. At a high level it looked something like this.
We saw a lot of South America but we also missed a lot – which means we’ll have to go back!
South America is a huge continent and if we had no limits to our travels we could have spent a year or two there. Here’s a link to our South America map – South America
And then there was Europe. Julie and I have spent quite a bit of time in Europe over the years – including living there for four years in our 20’s – so we wanted to hit a few spots that we hadn’t seen before (or at least hadn’t seen for a while). Here’s the map of our European travels.
Our travels in Europe were really about Scandinavia, catching up with old friends and a good dose of Spain and Portugal
We flew into Frankfurt, took a train to Antwerp where we picked up Tramp, then drove clock-wise through Scandinavia, Russia, the Baltic states, down through Europe, Spain and Portugal before finishing in the UK. Finally, here’s a link for our travels in Europe – Europe
Thank you Julie and Bill. I have loved all your travels and as you say, you have just scratched the surface. I don’t know how you keep going. I am exhausted after 4 weeks away and will be so glad to get home. But then the joys of selling and building starts, but you know about that too. Good luck with the build and we might catch up soon.
Love and hugs
Anne xoxo
Hi Anne, we loved reading about your travels in Europe – your adventures on a motorbike are much different to ours (and we could never do it!). See you soon.
Bill and Julie