Across Africa Part 1: Introduction and overview

In December 2024 I returned to East Africa for the second time that year. While I had already spent several months in Kenya and Tanzania between March and June, I hadn't given myself enough time to reach Mwanza, a city on the shores of Lake Victoria in northern Tanzania. Having lived there for two years between 2013-2015, I was curious to return, as well see more of the continent I’ve clocked up over 60,000km of cycling on.

And so I hatched a rough plan to ride across Africa from Nairobi to Luanda, a distance of around 4500-5000km, travelling through Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia and Angola.

While Kenya and Tanzania are familiar to me on a bike, I'd never cycled in Zambia - nor visited Angola, a country that until recent years required a visa in advance to visit.

Flights from Athens (I’d just finished a two-month tour of Greece) to Kenya with Qatar Airlines were relatively cheap (£230), and as I'd used this bike-friendly airline earlier in the year (generous baggage allowance with no excess charges to fly with a bicycle) and had friends living in Nairobi, my decision to fly there to start was an easy one.

The route across Africa was never particularly fixed. While I initially conceived that four months would be a sufficient amount of time to reach Luanda, where I had booked a return flight to the UK, it was almost seven months later, with closer to 8000km covered, that I made it to the Atlantic coast and Angola's capital.

Of my 210 days here this time, just 97 were riding days. There were some long stops in places where I had friends, and as usual I never felt I wanted to rush to be anywhere. Contracting malaria on three occasions also kept me unexpectedly stationary!

None of the riding days were particularly long in terms of distance (I averaged around 80km), which partly reflects the fact that more than 75% of the surfaces I rode on were dirt tracks. Cycling with 2.8" wide tyres is never fast, but I was grateful in a number of places for this, particularly the sandy tracks of eastern Angola. I was also thankful that winds were predominantly in my favour. I hadn't known before the start of this trip that I would have more tailwinds than headwinds, which always makes a difference.

I wild camped wherever I could, else stayed in simple accommodation or with friends. Like other bike trips in Africa, and elsewhere, my day-to-day travel costs were towards the lower end of the spending spectrum. Africa can be an expensive continent for a bike tour, especially if it involves going on a safari in some of the more famous national parks where cycling isn't permitted. Fortunately there are still opportunities to see wild animals, for which the continent is famous, without joining and paying for an organised safari.

The map above provides an overview of my route from Nairobi to Luanda, while the one below details all the tracks and roads I took, with each riding day available as downloadable GPX file from Komoot.

I predominantly used Komoot as a mapping app to create routes, but edited and modified this as I went, seeking to avoid main roads and urban areas as much as possible. Komoot is far from a perfect mapping app, so I used google maps and satellite views when possible, as well as sought advice from people. 

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