Come along on our adventure

That's us, the crazy ones :-)

Hello and welcome to Skint Adventure. I'm Charné, a South African and my hubby Kaif is a Brit. We moved from London to Cape Town nearly two and a half years ago and have been calling Cape Town home ever since. During our time here we have seen some of what this beautiful country has to offer, however since we will soon be moving back to Europe we decided to take full advantage of the gorgeous landscape and embark on a road trip of epic proportions around South Africa.

Skint Adventure is our little travel blog where we'll be sharing stories from our journey. The initial concept and planning for our South African adventure began way back in August 2014. Our list of stop-overs was extremely long at first and the toughest part was having to scale down and crossing some gems off our map (Lesotho, Swaziland, Mozambique, etc.). The next challenge was coming up with some kind of budget for this trip, we've tried to be as frugal as possible in order to fit in as much as we can into this trip, but I'll let you know whether our budget was realistic or not when we get to the end of the journey.

Just a mini breakdown of estimated basic costs:

Accommodation: R6500 [£367]
Food: R1000 [£56] (non-perishables, etc.)
Fuel: R6000 [£338]
Tolls: R500 [£28]
Entertainment: R4000 [£225]

Some crazy accommodation planning right there.

To give you a bit of background on accommodation, we initially looked at staying at B&B's around the country, but as it was the first time that both of us were visiting most of the places on our hit list, we realised that we didn't know anyone in some of the towns and had no idea of what there was to do, also we had quite a tight budget. So we decided to go a more social route and enlist the help of Airbnb to find suitable hosts in all of the towns we are visiting. This is the first time we'll be using Airbnb so I'll keep you posted on how it goes, but so far we've had a good experience, except for a few host cancellations which were already paid for and only get refunded 5-7 working days after the cancellation :-(

For food, we decided to go really low cost and stick to easy non-perishables like 2 Minute Noodles, baked beans, canned tuna, crackers, etc. We'll probably do a small amount of cooking wherever we are, but will pick up fresh ingredients from the town and then of course there will be the occasional treat of a nice dinner out on the town.

We initially looked into hiring a 4x4 or a sturdy car for our trip, but since we will be travelling for almost a month the cost was exorbitant and trying to find a car rental company that didn't try and screw you over on insurance and other additional fees was a bit of a pointless exercise. So we decided to put our little VW Golf Chico 1.3 through it's paces on the long road. We've had the car for more than a year now and it's served us well and has been serviced regularly. Although it is a bit old (2000 model) we're optimistic that it'll survive the long road.

The toll roads are one thing we didn't initially think of when planning this trip and we actually only became aware of this when plotting our route on Google Maps, but it doesn't look as if we'll be encountering too many of these, so we've budgeted a relatively small amount for this. Our entertainment budget will cover all our day trips to local attractions and restaurants, etc. It's very skimpy, but we'll see how we get by.

We set off early on the 2nd of December and can't wait to hit the long road.