Money when travelling through Africa

[Mr&Mrs Warner]

Hi

My husband and I are doing a 58 day overland tour from Kenya down to South Africa and we need to pay around £1200 each in USD as a local payment the day before the trip starts. We'd actually need a bit more than this for things like VISAs, etc along the way. This would be fine for us to get at home before we leave, however we have 2 weeks of volunteer work in Tanzania before the tour begins and I'm not sure that carrying around that amount of money is such a great idea. I've thought about sewing pockets into clothes and underwear, etc. but it's still an awful lot of money to carry around on us for 2 weeks - I wouldn't even do that here in the UK let alone in Africa!

I've heard that the exchange rate for traveller's cheques is really high and obviously I won't be able to draw that much money out of ATMs so any advice on what to do would be much appreciated. Should we just hide the money and carry it around with us or go with the traveller's cheques when we arrive in Nairobi despite having to exchange into local currency and then into dollars?

Any help and advice would be much appreciated as I'm quite stuck on what we should do.

Thank you!
Ayla