Peter wrote:
you have each other’s company. That is incredibly rare in GA, and is priceless.
Yup
terbang wrote:
After a few days of discussion we decided not to pursue the Africa idea any further.
Thanks for the great sory about your trip to Oz. I would, however, strongly suggest not to give up on Africa. It’s perhaps the most amazing GA flying you can do, anywhere. The trick, IMHO, is not to try to fly to the interesting, i.e. sub-Sahara, parts of the continent in a SEP from Europe, but rather get a local license by validation and rent. Most people do this in South Africa. There’s a Dutch guy on here (sorry, can’t remember his handle right now, he doesn’t post very often), who can help with organizing this.
terbang wrote:
One more thing bothered me I didn’t mention, financial risk. This isn’t life threatening, of course but could be very unpleasant. Even a flat tire could get very expensive say in India, let alone a more serious technical issue.
To me, this would perhaps be my biggest worry. It can be difficult enough even here in the US if it happens in some remote place, but in some of the countries you crossed on your route a reltaively simple issue may well lead to having to write off the plane.
@aeroplus was doing African safaris.
There was another high social media profile guy from NL doing them too but he went crazy over less than ecstatic coverage of his kids’ heavily-ground-supported RTW trips (and maybe something else, I suspect) and created a load of behind the scenes hassle for me, so I suggest avoiding him carefully 
I am sure Terbang and Dkbe know how to do all this. Africa is full of GA and has a reasonable “ecosystem” – at least in places where the locals won’t convert you into tomato & basil soup before sunset
Thank you for the nice write up!
I flew from Germany to Australia last year with a TBM 700 so we did not really have to deal with AVGAS availability and had a fantastic trip.
We left EDNY on the 20th of April late afternoon to fly to Crete (LGIR). A nice (late) dinner and a good night sleep later, we left to Saudi Arabia and went to overnight in Oman. The next day, I had planned an overnight stop in Mumbai but we we still waiting for our visas. We therefore filed a back up plan to do only a full stop in Mumbai and go to Mattala in Sri-Lanka for the night. Once we landed in Mumbai, we had our visas but were asked to carry on with the plan to Sri Lanka so we missed a nice evening with local friends but had a great stop in Sri Lanka: We stayed at an amazing hotel (Wild tented lodge) on the coast, went for nice safari before flying out to Bali for the next overnight with a stop in Medan for fuel. The next day, we cleared Customs in Darwin and made it to Sydney for dinner with a new happy owner!
To add to comments from others: Africa is not to be missed. We flew to Namibia a few months ago and this was my first trip to Africa. I loved it! We flew down on the East coast (Egypt, Djibouti,Rwanda) and back on the West coast (Sao Tome & Principe, Abidjan, Dakkar and Morocco). We are going there again this summer via Saudi Arabia and Tanzania but taking a long way home: Mozambique, Comores, Seychelles, Maldives, Sri-Lanka, Cambodia, Laos, Taipei, Japan, Korea, Mongolia, Kazakstan and Romania.
There is of course quite a bit of planning going on before and behind the scenes during these long trips but I love them.I will report on this next trip once we are back in October!
