Preparing and Packing for Africa

Now with our itinerary settled, my focus has turned to preparing and packing for this trip!

I have found the Canadian Government travel site useful whenever I needed to look up country specific entry requirements, amongst other miscellaneous information. 

So with some quick research, I found that there were no formal visas that were required for a Canadian citizen travelling to Egypt, United Arab Emirates or Egypt

Interestingly though, is South Africa requires you to have two blank pages in your passport or you may be denied entry: one for a temporary residence sticker and another for entry and exit stamps.

Egypt will charge us for a tourist visa at the port of entry so we will need to purchase one once we arrive.

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In terms of vaccinations, there wasn’t anything that was required in order to travel to any of the countries, however it was recommended by my travel clinic that I take vaccinations against Yellow Fever, Typhoid, and Hepatitis A and B.  Thankfully, because of my trip to South America last year (stay tuned for a future post!) I already had the Yellow Fever, Typhoid, Hep B and the first of 2 Hep A vaccinations.  This time around I only needed the second Hep A shot to secure lifetime vaccination!

Now onto the packing! Normally I wouldn’t sweat the packing too much, but for this trip I needed to give it a little more thought since we’ll be dealing with two different climates and seasons (winter in South Africa and summer in Egypt and the UAE).

It’s winter in South Africa right now so it’s on the cool side. Meanwhile the heat in Egypt is a bit intimidating for a Canadian used to mild summers!

Another consideration that was new for me this time around was the recommendation that we pack to be as mobile as possible. This meant using a backpack for most of my things instead of my normal carry-on rollerboard. The challenge was finding a backpack that would suit me not only for this trip, but future trips. I wanted the flexibility of a carry-on, but it also had to be a good size to hold everything I needed! After a lot of research and reading reviews, I picked up the  Osprey Farpoint 40.

So with a backpack in hand, I ended up with the following packing list:

• 8 pairs of underwear
• 6 tops
• 1 polo shirt (worn on travel days)
• 2 sport/sleep shorts
• 2 pairs of Prana stretch Zion pants (1 worn on travel days)
• 1 pair of khaki shorts
• Flip flops
• Santa Cruz Crocs
• Runners (worn on travel days)
• 4 pairs of socks
• First aid kit
• Down jacket
• Rain jacket
• Sleeping bag liner
• Sun hat
• Panasonic FZ1000 with spare batteries
• GoPro Hero 4
• GoPro accessories
• Extra memory cards
• Laptop
• iPad Mini
• External hard drive
• Portable battery
• Travel adaptor
• Headphones
• Toiletries
• Passport and travel documents

Which looked like:

Most of my clothes I put into packing cubes. I’ve found them to be extremely useful in organizing and compressing articles of clothing and have used them for years.  This trip would be no different. 

Packing cubes also allow for some “tetrising” and so with everything slotted into the pack it looks like:

Of course I didn’t forget the stars of the show:

And when its all said and done:

All in all I’m, I’m happy that everything fit nicely into my packs and am now looking forward to getting on the road! This will be the first time I’ll be double “backpacking”  it so I’m interested to see how I fare with this setup.  Perhaps it’ll be my preferred method of travel in the future!

We’ll be starting our journey tonight! I hope to update this blog with posts throughout our trip so keep checking back!