somewhat enchanted and in great anticipation we are following our hearts and making our great dream of life come true: driving from Zurich, Switzerland to Cape Town, South Africa with our own Land Rover Defender within one year.
the seed of this dream has already sown many years ago, when Katharina had just finished her high school years and followed her deep inner wish to travel to Africa. Arrived in the red-sanded country Namibia, it felt like «coming home» for her. The time there influenced her personality enormously and uncovered her unlimited thirst for life.
someone would call it luck or destiny that we have met each other during our studies of Pharmaceutical Sciences at ETH Zurich. From the first moment on we felt that we have been connected by our (not only) unconditional wanderlust, our curiosity and our love and interest for all living beings. During our first joined journey to Africa, one of these unique moments in life of deep unity happened: without knowing anything about Katharina’s dream of driving through Africa, Joas shared his desire to her to drive from Switzerland all the way down to South Africa in a Land Rover Defender. Since this moment, our dream has accompanied us day by day.
as time and several journeys to various African countries passed by, the love to this fascinating continent has deepen and led us to decide making our dream come true.
it was late 2018 (and actually at the same time of our anniversary) when, after an odyssey of research, we have finally found our perfect travel partner: a TD5 110 Land Rover Defender from 2001. Since we have owned this great vehicle, we have followed the journey of our dream blinkered and without compromises including self-reconstruction of the Defender to a camper, organizing the travel route and everything linked with it, spending hours of research and learning new skills, putting ourselves out of the comfort zones, saving enough money and finally quitting our jobs.
now, we are ready, ready to leave our lives in Switzerland behind us, ready to start and conquer this adventure, ready to explore, to experience, to learn, to grow, ready to get ourselves completely into this life with every single fiber.
Our journey has started on August 5th, 2019 and will bring us along Italy and Greece via Turkey to the Middle East. Dependent on political situations, we will enter into Africa through Sudan and driving along the East side all the way down to our final destination, the Cape of Good Hope.
the name of our project «Beyond Africa» reflects not only the fact of passing three different continents but also our aspiration to totally devote to it than just travelling the roads.
If you are interested to follow the trail of our adventure, we invite you to visit this blog and our Instagram account from time to time.
We would like to thank from the bottom of our hearts to our families, who have always supported us enormously (and not only for this project) and who are there for us all the time. It is certainly not easy to let us go. we highly appreciate your confidence and your unconditional love will always go along and guard us. Thank you so much to all our friends, who not only helped us physically in reconstructing the Defender, but also who have been so much committed to our project, supported us mentally and granted us their understanding when time of friendship had to soak for our project. To feel secured, loved and supported gives us the feeling of home and this feeling will accompany us everywhere in the world.