Preparation - 4
COMMUNICATION
Satellite and mobile phone
In the past couple of years mobile phone coverage in Africa has greatly increased. With the proper SIM card we can phone Holland with our standard NOKIA 6310 I from, among others, South Africa, Namibia, Tanzania and Kenya, without noticeable problems. That is, as long as we are in or reasonably near to urban areas or driving on major roads. As little as 40 km outside Dar es Salaam, in Mbande village, Paul has to climb on top of an anthill to stand a chance of receiving and transmitting anything! So, in addition to our NOKIA we also take a satellite phone. The choice between the two major systems - Iridium and Thuraya - is easy. Thuraya does not provide coverage for most of sub-Saharan Africa, Iridium does. The next decision is to buy or to rent. Renting an Iridium phone costs about € 390 per month, but if you need it for a couple of months there is quite some negotiating margin. The cheapest offer we got for six months was € 200 p/m. Still, for private use this is extremely costly. Buying a Motorola-Iridium 9505A with some essential accessories (charger, car kit and antennae) costs somewhere between € 1500 and € 1700. Depending on the service packet, each minute to a mobile or fixed number anywhere costs you between € 1.5 and € 0.6. An additional problem is that we could not find an insurance company willing to insure either a rented or a bought satellite phone! For further information go to www.smartsatcom.com or www.rentcenter.nl. After hesitating for a long time, we eventually bought a Motorola 9505A with data kit. Shop around for awhile, because price differences are substantial (in the order of € 300 for the telephone alone) and most suppliers only reveal their prices on request. Eventually we ended up with KSC in Eindhoven (www.kscehv.nl).
2Connect in Waalre is reliable as well, but they were piqued when we asked them why they were at least € 250 more expensive than one of their competitors. The answer was that they usually supplied to industry and not to private individuals. We considered that bad sales management and dropped them.
Laptop and DigiMate II-plus
To be able to report regularly to the home front, to keep our website up to date and our webmaster happy we take our Toshiba Satellite A100 with us. Its fixed place is in a case mounted between the two front seats, together with the chargers and telephones. To store additional photographs we use our DigiMate II-plus 40 GB portable hard disk. It takes the memory cards of both the Nikon and the Minolta.
Intercom
Although we worked hard to kill some of the noise in Wa Bashasha’s cabin and were reasonably successful, it is still a noisy car. We therefore decided to invest in a wireless intercom. Eventually we bought an Alan 777. It gives us the additional advantage of being able to communicate with each other whilst one person is outside the car. Convenient when Meta has to instruct me from the ground how to get out of a muddy ditch and to keep in contact when one of us has to leave the car on a limited radius errand.
Finances
We carry the usual credit cards, some traveller cheques and a limited amount of cash. We obtained a list with Barclays ATM points all along our route and made arrangements with ABN-AMRO to draw cash dollars from some of the main braches of Barclays.
SUPPORT
At home in Holland and on the road in Africa it is nice to be able to fall back on some pre-arranged support when the chips are down. Our son, who lives nearby, can formally act on behalf of us and is the only one who can reach us directly on our sat phone. He has copies (hard as well as electronic) of all our important documents (passports, insurance policies, carnet the passage, etc.). We made arrangements with our Land Rover garage in Oisterwijk and with Paddock in the UK in case spare parts have to be flown out. Our son, however, has to call them to action.
© 2005-2006 Paul and Meta Lapperre - Website by MvS
