Trailblazer Guide Books

Wonderful handbooks
 — The Bookseller

A plan

Before the preparation comes a plan, an outline of the regions and destinations you’d like to visit. It’s not uncommon to initially come up with a certain romantic flow or theme: following the Silk Road to Beijing or following the Mediterranean coast from Casablanca to Istanbul. Or setting off in a Series III Land Rover as your parents may have done before you came along. Then you discover there is no single ‘Silk Road’, the border between Morocco and Algeria has been closed for years and that these days an old-Series Land Rover is better on the cover of a book than it is to drive for months on end.

This is just the start. If you make it to p689 your expertise in the whole business will have multiplied exponentially. A few edges may have been knocked off your starry dream, but you’ll be in much better shape to take on what lies ahead.

Once you’ve got over that possible disappointment there comes another shock that can be paraphrased from the Prussian military strategist Helmuth von Moltke’s famous quote: ‘no plan survives contact with the road’. It’s hard to imagine not having some sort of outline before you leave, if only to avoid undesirable interruptions and expenses. But soon enough that schedule will become derailed, in most cases before you even leave. Your big adventure is like a major civil engineering project: it will be late and over budget. It’s rare to leave on your original departure date, so don’t set this or what follows in stone. Without necessarily adorning yourself with a headband and sandals, once on the road be ready to ‘go with the flow’. Compared to the life you’ve been leading up to now, life on the road will be unpredictable and requires flexibility.

Be wary of over-ambitious goals, or anticipate them and be happy to return home having done much less than you planned but still satisfied. Even in the right season (see p12) most first-time overlanders greatly underestimate the time it takes to cover ground in parts of Asia and Africa, let alone the desirability of simply slowing down.
To want to try and see it all is understandable when you consider the cost and effort you’re making to get this far, but once you’re inching out of a Far East container depot into the chaos of the city, or rolling off the end of a sealed highway into a remote area of tracks, reality bites. Sitting at the sharp end of your adventure, it then runs around and jabs you in the butt and your spectacular trans-continental expedition, unparalleled since the sweeping hordes of Genghis Khan, crumples like a paper cup. The good thing is: you’re there. With a new-found humility you might whisper ‘er… bring it on’.

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