Build your road: plan the Kalahari Red Dune Route day by day

Where this is

The R360 runs north from Upington to the Kgalagadi gate at Twee Rivieren. The R31 crosses it at Andriesvale: east to Van Zylsrus, west to Rietfontein and the Namibian border.

The planner needs JavaScript

It measures real road distances between the places you pick and writes you a day sheet, and it does all of that in your browser so that it still works once the signal goes. Without it, the two pages that carry the same facts are all thirty-nine places and the route.

Why it works like this

From Askham onward, there are no bars

That one fact decides everything on this page. The most useful thing this site can do is hand you the whole trip while you still have signal, so every number is worked out in your own browser and everything you pick leaves with you as a file.

Every number is measured. The distances and drive times between your stops are real road distances off the OpenStreetMap network, not straight lines on a map. The ground under the map is our own satellite imagery of the southern Kalahari, graded to the colour of the sand, and it is served from this site rather than from a mapping company.

The GPX follows the road itself rather than drawing a line between two farms, so a GPS will not try to route you across the veld. Google Maps takes up to nine stops in one link.

255 kmUpington to the Twee Rivieren gate
160 kmAndriesvale east to Van Zylsrus, and it takes four hours
72 kmAndriesvale west to Rietfontein and the border
39Front doors on the three of them

And getting to Upington

From Johannesburg: 781 kmabout 9 h 30 on the N14
From Cape Town: 829 kmabout 9 h 30 on the N7 and the R27
From Upington airport: 51 kmto where the route starts
From Namibia: 88 kmRietfontein border post to Askham

Ask your host about the last stretch. Some of these turn-offs are sand and a map cannot tell you which.