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Vehicle Insurance

Third party car insurance is mandatory and normally arranged at the border when you enter a country. In RSA, Botswana, Namibia & Swaziland it used to be included in the fuel price but nowadays you have to buy at the borders.

A tip when visiting countries from Zambia Northwards is to buy something called a COMESA (Yellow Card). This can be bought to cover a number of countries therefore negating the need to buy a policy as you enter each border. It will save you loads, problem is finding an insurance company in Southern Africa who understands it and can issue it.

On the other hand insurance cover against loss or damage for your own vehicle is purely down to personal choice but be warned it is expensive.

Normal run of the mill UK insurance companies will not be interested in quoting for this but we eventually found two specialist UK companies who are used to overlanders needs

Alexander Forbes Risk Services Ltd
Alexander Forbes House,
6 Bevis Marks,
London, EC3A 7AF

Tel: 0207 933 0000

NB. Forbes has now been bought by Lockton Insurance Services.

Lockton House
6 Bevis Marks,
London, EC3A 7AF
Tel: 0207 933 0000

Campbell (Insurance Brokers) Ltd
48 Earl's Court Road, Kensington,
London W8 6EJ

Tel: 020 7937 6981

Be prepared to pay four figures for this insurance with a hefty excess as well but when you consider how much you invest in your vehicle then overall it is worth it for the peace of mind.

Personal Insurance

This is a must but mainly only really from a medical repatriation point of view. 

Again we had some difficulties when we came to arranging this as most run of the mill UK insurers will only quote for trips of 30 days or less. If they do longer periods then it is usually only available  to youngsters backpacking on a gap year.

I think these companies are missing an opportunity here as more and more oldies are now doing gap years too (see Guardian article here) 

Eventually by searching the Net we found a few companies who provide for people like us. In our first year we chose Primary Insurance at a cost of £372, which at the time we thought was pretty good. However we never had to make a claim so cannot vouch for their service in that regard, certainly when it came up for renewal they were impossible to contact from Africa and they never contacted us so we have doubts about their veracity.

In our second year we bought a long stay policy from InsureandGo who seemed ok until we made a claim for our expenses in returning unexpectedly for Pete's Mum's funeral in 2007.

Initially they rejected our claim as it transpired the curtailment clause in their long stay policy is really geared to people on package type tours so they expect you to have a return air ticket and use that to get back to the UK.

Under curtailment they will only consider reimbursing you for the unfulfilled part of a holiday package which you have already paid for such as accommodation, side tours, car hire etc but not for the cost to fly back to the UK.

This doesn't work for us as since year one we buy our air tickets in Africa so for each trip the return portion is actually the flight back to Africa. Therefore when Pete's Mum died we were not in possession of an air ticket, the plan being to buy this when we returned as usual in early 2008, so the tickets we bought to return for  the funeral were over and above this and we felt justified in claiming for this extra expense. 

It was only after a protracted debate that InsureandGo's MD got involved and agreed to reimburse us for the flight back to the UK but not for the return back to Africa, which at least was something.

Since then we have discovered InsureandGo are not alone in defining their curtailment clause in this way which considering the policies are touted as a long term single trip we feel is at least misleading. 

The lesson is if you get travel insurance then don't expect to be insured against unexpected returns to the UK other than possibly medical emergencies and even then they will expect you to use the air ticket they think you already have!        

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