Overlanding is a very different style of travel to what we've grown accustomed to this year. Where we normally had to make decisions about where to go and when, we now just get told where we're headed. If we liked or disliked a place we had the option of slowing down or speeding up our progress as we pleased. Not any more. Previously, we had to organise food from day to day, check in and out of hostels and find out how to get from A to B. These days we just arrive at meal times to be fed, pitch and pack down our tent and jump on our truck (Chobe) when departure time rolls around. Very different. Here's a day in the life of an overland traveller...

The alarm goes off around 5:30am. We can hear various alarms from the other overlander's tents pitched nearby, and the resultant grumbles and tent zippers rasping as people dash off to the loos for a quick pee break (the girls especially avoid peeing during the night due to fears of being accidentally hunted). We transfer all of our bedding to the truck and pull down the tent before heading to breakfast. Our ticket to breakfast is our tent pulled down and packed away.

Breakfast is a ritual. Our tour leader and chef Bombastic greets us with unparalleled enthusiasm, and after asking us how we slept he reports that he slept "like a little baby next to Mama". Sounds pretty good right? Coffee is brewed and we serve ourselves whatever's on offer this morning: hot pancakes, scrambled eggs or Spanish omelette, maybe some little sausages or French toast are served alongside the regular cereals, yoghurts and fresh fruits. Bombastic has been awake for over an hour already preparing this for us. We sit and enjoy our breakfast, slowly waking up as the sun rises and the sky overhead becomes a kaleidoscope of colours.

After a brief scramble for everyone to go to the toilets, make some lunch (if necessary), wash up and pack the kitchen equipment away (maybe even taking our malaria tablets or brushing our teeth if we remember) we board Truck Chobe and hit the road. What follows next is a random assortment of events spread over long hours driving. Bushy-bushy (toilet stops in the middle of nowhere), napping, waving at happy children on the roadside, border crossings, whiplash from the occasional severe speed bump or pot hole, listening to ipods, reading or gazing off into the distance fills in the day. We will sometimes stop at a shopping centre in a major city to resupply our snacks and water; otherwise we may need to hit a Bureau De Change for some currency exchange or pharmacy for more Malarone. A typical day of driving is around 9 or 10 hours; some of the longer days get up around 13 hours from start to finish. What amazes me still is the distances we cover. Back home 13 hours driving would allow you to traverse 1200km or so, maybe a little less than 100km/h overall on your typical highways. Here a massive day on the road will amass a total of 500km travelled. The quality of roads is definitely getting better the further south we go (our driver Kule Kule and his smile just seem to get bigger by the day!), but some of the stretches of road take 4 hours to cover 100km (just persistent road blocks, corrugations and pot holes, drunk police officers, kilometres of haulage trucks lined up at roadworks... you name it, we've slowed down or stopped for it). Indeed one memorable traffic jam in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania saw us take over two hours to travel the 5km or so from one side of the city to the other. If you think the Bruce Highway northbound on a Friday afternoon is bad, you haven't seen anything yet!

Once at our destination for the night we will efficiently pitch our tents and either grab a shower or head to the bar (every campsite has a bar... convenient right? ;). If there is WiFi we will battle for the bandwidth, trying desperately to upload photos to our blog, send messages home (assuring family we're still alive) or check our emails. If there's no WiFi we'll actually interact with one another; playing Uno or Boa, maybe watch another magnificent sunset or just old-fashioned chatting. I cant help but prefer the campsites with no WiFi.

Dinner will be served around 7pm. Bombastic (ever the eager chef) will deliver some magnificent meal out of his bag of tricks and we will once again be left wondering how on Earth he does it with such limited facilities and ingredients. The true outback chef is a Zimbabwean tour guide working for Acacia. He thanks us for earing and thanks us for coming to Africa. We eat and eat (there's always seconds and it tastes too good to not go back for more) while Bombastic thanks Kule Kule for "keeping the wheels on the road" and outlines the itinerary for the next few days in his daily "2 minutes, 2 seconds" speech. I can tell you with absolute certainty that he always lasts longer than that. We will sometimes discuss the country we're in and the current socioeconomic situation it faces; otherwise we will be briefed on upcoming activities (included or optional), and be told what time breakfast will be ready the next day. We wash up, and I could pretend that we sit up til late chewing the fat and gazing at the stars, but nine times out of ten we'll be flat out exhausted and hit the sack ASAP. I'll set the alarm and fall asleep to the sounds of wild animals nearby.

Thus far overlanding has been a welcome change to our TwentyFifteen Plan travels. I can't say that some of the longer days on the road didn't send me stir crazy, but it's always worth it when we arrive at another beautiful campsite. It has been nice to take a back seat and just go where the tour leader says, and the constant company of other like-minded travellers has been a welcome change (since our normal period of meeting people, making friends and saying our farewells is about 48 hours these days). We need to thank Alan and Sandra Turvey for their contribution to this part of our trip. They simply requested that we spend some time this year camping, and I couldn't imagine a better part of the world to be out in the fresh air, close to nature and enjoying the beauty of another perfect sunrise / sunset in a big, clear sky.