Afrinkong
The idea
You don’t visit Africa. You move through it.
What a crossing is, why it has to be driven, and why nobody assembles one from home.
Africa is too large to be a destination.
Dakar to Mombasa is further than Lisbon to Kabul, and there are fifty-four countries in between. A week in one of them is a week in one of them — which is the right journey for most people most of the time, and it is what the rest of this site is for.
You don’t visit Africa. You move through it.
A crossing is the other answer. You travel by road, you wake up in a different country most weeks, and the continent changes slowly enough to watch it happen: the landscape first, then the language, then what is for sale at the roadside, then what is for dinner.
Nobody assembles that from home
Nobody assembles that from home. Borders keep their own hours, permits are booked in months rather than days, and the part that decides whether a month works is having somebody whose job is the phone call at the frontier post on a Sunday.
A journey worth taking is worth preparing for, and a crossing is worth preparing for a long time — start planning your journey.