Crossing Africa on a truck to get a different perspective

Today, a guest post from Nicolas Bori, winner of last year’s global working video competition.

Last year Global Integration ran an online competition which I found really interesting and decided to take part in it. My video, “Cultural glasses”, showcased cultural differences, such as body language, among different countries.

A few months after winning, my girlfriend and I decided to quit our job at a search engine to go exploring some more cultural differences first hand. We flew straight to Mozambique, in the southeast of Africa, and embarked on a five month overland trip crossing the entire continent until reaching the coast of the Mediterranean sea at the top of Egypt.

This is a short video about our journey:

We crossed Mozambique, Swaziland, Lesotho, South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi, Tanzania, Kenya, Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt. It was an eye-opening, once in a lifetime, 20.000 km long journey, during which we got to see a myriad of different perspectives and ways of living, from meeting tribes such as the San-Bushmen or the Hammer to witnessing religious ceremonies by a river in Ethiopia or bargaining at a camel market in Sudan.

We completed the first month and four countries of our adventure as independent travelers, crossing Africa from east to west with a rented car. Once in Capetown we joined a group of 15 people to drive in a so-called overlander (modified truck) all the way to Cairo. This truck would be basically our mode of transport, home and kitchen for the following four months. The trip involved a lot of camping, sometimes for many days in remote areas, which meant we needed to be self sufficient in terms of sleeping and eating arrangements, including a 300 liter water tank for those long days crossing deserts in Namibia, Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt.

The adventure was also a great internal journey for me, that led me to re-consider the paths I want to follow in life. In my case it involved considering a career change. Since I returned to Argentina after the trip, I have been working on turning the 15.000 files of HD footage we brought back into a travel series, to help share this experience with others and offer an authentic, ground-level view of Africa through the lens of my camera.

At the beginning of December we launched a crowdfunding campaign on the Indiegogo website. We are now trying to raise 6.000 euros. Contributors are rewarded with perks like postcards, DVDs, associate producer credits or even a private screening of the finished episodes. This money will allow us to start producing the African series professionally, which will tentatively have eight episodes of 25 minutes each and will cover the entire trip from the moment we decided to quit our jobs in Ireland to the day we reached the great pyramids of Giza at the end of our journey.

If you would like to see this story in your screen in full HD make sure to support the project by contributing and ordering your very own DVD or any of the other perks! Also, if you found our video worth sharing, please go ahead and post it on your social networks. Your help will go a long way in turning the series into a reality, to extend the’ “cultural glasses” to the African continent and share with the rest of the world some new views of this beautiful land.

Check the full pledge video here: igg.me/at/iquit