Paperwork 
Carnet de Passage

A 'carnet de passage en douane' is an international document for the vehicle. It can be used to temporarily import your car en export it without having to pay for it. For us the closest office where we can obtain a carnet was the German automobile association ADAC in Munich. To get a carnet is not so easy. It requires a lot of paperwork and a huge deposit. The deposit depends on the countries you will be entering. Because we will pass Egypt, it’s going to cost us…

You must be extremely careful and precise with the carnet, as you need a stamp at every entry border and every exit border. If you miss only one stamp, you’ll have the biggest trouble getting your deposit back!

Visas

Our first idea was to arrange as much visas as possible before we leave. Though later on we realised that this is expensive. Also, because of the limited validity of visa, you’re on a time schedule and that’s the last thing we want!! So we decided to obtain visa during our trip which, for what we heard, is not a big problem, make take some time though. We will most definitely have trouble obtaining a visa for Sudan, this will be the toughest country for us to get in. We’ll just have to stay calm, have patience and maybe pay some money…

International driving licence

We need two different international drivers licenses for our trip, both easily obtainable at the Dutch automobile association ANWB. Both cost 13 euros and are nothing more than a piece of paper with a photo stapled to it and a whole lot of stamps!

We also need an international registration document of the vehicle, called an IBM. Cost: 10 euros, again, just a little piece of paper…

Medical documents

Both of us have the obligatory yellow fever booklet with all the stamps for all of the vaccinations we had. We will also take with us two statements of good health, just for sure.

Photo’s

We both have 30 black/white and 30 colour pass photos with us. It’s important to bring enough of these. Always take the pictures straight from the front.

For all paperwork, it’s very important to make a lot of copies. And always try to use the copies instead of the originals whenever documents are asked.