I have spent the last few days sneaking off whenever I am able and
jumping on-line to read the tonnes of blogs already up in cyberspace, from
people doing similar trips. Wow. There is such a lot of good info out there for
these overlanders. I plan to add a few of the ones I like on to a links page
here so check them out when you get a chance.
The idea has well and truly taken root now and I have dedicated a
fair few hours working out an approximate route. Still undecided which way to
travel, either from or to the UK from or to Australia, however I guess the
route will still be the same we will just face a different direction.
I figured the next step getting the plan together is an estimate of timing and
costs.
Google earth shows the route at being 17465 kilometres long. So I throw
some guesses at it. 50ks per hour gives 349 hours driving. With driving 6 hours
a day, which I figure shouldn't be too hard between two drivers, gives 58 days
driving. Happy with that as my initial estimate would be 3 months to complete,
so this gives 32 extra days to play with. Also had a stab at working out fuel
costs, now these will vary massively from terrain, to fuel price etc but as a
loose guess I throw 600ks per tank, giving 29 tanks of fuel to cover the
distance. As I am generally dealing in Aussie dollars I guess at $130 per tank,
coming to $3900 in fuel. For some reason that's not as high as I thought it was
going to be. This gets me thinking, food 3 meals a day, 58 days, $20 per
meal....$3480 for each person. Again not as bad as I thought. Its easy to spend
money on paper though! That's $10,860 I have just 'spent'.
Still I had grabbed
$20K as an approx amount to budget for. So that leaves about 10k for shipping, flights, accommodation (Camping), repairs, emergencies etc etc.. Might be a bit tight...a buddy of mine Ross keeps looking at bringing a car back over from the UK are reckons that a shared container is somewhere in the region of $3000, and thats with out permits, inspections etc etc. which straight away takes a chunk out... I am starting to think 30K is more realistic, the more I think about it the more costs pop up in my head, visas, "facilitation" payments at borders...
Will be interesting to see how that all
works out.
No comments:
Post a Comment