So whenever I talk about my trips with people, they seem really surprised that I plan all my trips on my own. Since I’m not a fan of tour groups and find it way cheaper to do it on my own, I usually do a lot of research and plan pretty detailed daily itineraries. I know it can also be more daunting trying to plan trips that cover multiple weeks and multiple cities/countries. Since I am trying to finish visiting all the continents in the next couple years, this year I decided to visit Africa. I picked South Africa specifically because of the diversity of the country—it has the 3rd largest canyon in the world and gold mines (Panorama Route); lagoons, beaches, caves, and bungee jumping (Garden Route); beautiful wine country (Franschhoek); a beautiful major city with mountains, beaches, and a peninsula (Cape Town); history (Nelson Mandela and Cradle of Humankind); and of course one of the most popular national parks with animals in the world (Kruger). South Africa is the 25th largest country in the world and double the size of Texas, so it was a little overwhelming at first figuring out where to begin. So here was my process for planning.
Step 1- International Flight
Flights are usually my first step when planning a trip. I usually like going during shoulder season since there are less people and it is less expensive. Initially, I knew I wanted to go to both Cape Town and Kruger National Park. I thought I would fly into Cape Town and then fly over to Johannesburg since that is the closest major airport to Kruger National Park. However, during my initial research, I realized that it took less time on average to fly from DC (my airport) to Johannesburg with less stops (one compared to two) and a little bit cheaper. So I focused on a DC to Johannesburg flight.
I like following “Scott’s Cheap Flights” to see if there are any flight deals and actually, around Thanksgiving, there was a black Friday sale for flights DC to Johannesburg for less than $600, about 18 hours in duration total. Unfortunately, I wasn’t ready to book then, but that’s something to keep in mind if you are looking to book in the future. Obviously the more stops and longer the duration, the cheaper the flight. I have regularly seen $600 flights, but they are about a 26-30 hour total duration.
In my case, I wanted to go in early May (much cheaper than late May) and incorporate Memorial Day since that was an extra day I had off work. Due to work issues, however, we had to plan it for later in May. And I actually wanted to find the shortest flight as possible. The shortest flight possible was 17 hours from DC to Johannesburg, including an hour stop in Ghana. Unfortunately I didn’t realize until after booking, but you actually stay on the plane during the “stop-over” in Ghana. I probably would have booked a 20 hour flight instead had I known. For some reason, being able to get off the plane and walk around the airport briefly makes the trip seem a lot shorter to me. So we booked that flight for about $900, on South African air, but had we booked earlier in May or chose a longer flight duration, we could have got a $600 flight (however the Black Friday special I mentioned earlier was actually the same 17 hour duration).
Step 2- Safari
So now that the main flight was booked, I still wasn’t sure of the next step. Do I want to fly straight to Cape Town or go to Kruger first? The way I decided that was based on the Safari. It’s not uncommon for people to plan an Africa trip a year or more in advance. That means Safaris and bush camps fill up pretty early. Since I booked my flights about 5 and a half months out, I knew this could be an issue so I decided to check out availability first.
Some people choose to just drive around going to many bush camps in Kruger, but the downfall of that is you must stay on the roads. If an animal is walking way far in the brush, you cannot go off the road. So there are private game reserves where your guides can drive you anywhere they own. The most popular game reserve is Sabi Sands. Safaris in general are very expensive, which is why a lot of people don’t do them. But YOLO, right?! I mean I probably won’t be back to South Africa and there is no guarantee I will be back to Africa for a Safari, so I thought it is worth a splurge. There are maybe a couple dozen game reserves in Sabi Sands, most of which are more than a thousand dollars a night per person. So, as you can imagine, the “budget” safaris go quick. I did some research on Tripadvisor to find “budget” safari options. Most were booked the entire three weeks I would be in South Africa. However, I ended up finding one that still had several dates available during the time we would be there! I thought two days would be a good amount of time for the safari—counting on one day you might miss out on a lot of animals and three days is just getting too expensive. Since I am sure you are wondering, the place we picked, Umkumbe Safari, is about $500 per person per day. So if you want to do a safari at a private game reserve in South Africa, be prepared to save up your money, or else you can just stay at the bush camps. The fee does include the following daily—two game drives, a bush walk, all meals and snacks.
The dates of availability I found were about four days after we arrived in Johannesburg. Because of that, I decided to explore Kruger National Park (as opposed to the private game reserve) first.
Just as a side note, there is also the option to book your safaris with tour groups that provide everything for multiple days. These are really expensive though and too crowded for me!
Step 3- Rest Camps
I wanted to spend more than two days in Kruger, but obviously staying at a game reserve is very expensive. So I also wanted to spend a couple of days in the other part of Kruger. The popular and cheaper options are rest camps. There are about a dozen of those, and so of course they fill up quick. Kruger National Park is very large, so there are some rest camps that are more secluded than others, hours away. The more popular rest camps are Lower Sabie, Crocodile Bridge, and Skukuza. The first two were full around the dates I wanted, so I went with my third option, Skukuza. Unfortunately, Skukuza is one of the busiest rest camps, but on the plus side, there are restaurants there. I would have preferred the other two. At the rest camps, you have options to stay in tents, bungalows, cottages, etc. We chose a bungalow.
Okay so the dates available were the first two full days I will be in South Africa, then there are two days until the Safari. So there were two days in between. Obviously the earlier you book things, the more options you have, so keep that in mind.
Step 4- Panorama Route
During my initial research via Tripadvisor, I found a lot of people mentioned wanting to go to explore the “Panorama Route” near Kruger. I found that the Panorama Route is right outside of Kruger and has the 3rd largest canyon in the world, a gold mine, waterfalls, and gorgeous views. So clearly this was the perfect thing to fit for the two days in between the Rest Camp and the Sabi Sands Safari. When I am staying somewhere for more than a day, I like booking Airbnbs. So I found a gorgeous Airbnb near the canyon.
Generally when planning details or what to do on trips, I actually first check my emails. I follow Travel & Leisure, Conde Nast Traveler, The Every Girl, the Facebook group Girls Love Travel. And whenever I see an article or list of somewhere I am interested in, I email it to myself. So when planning trips, I often already have activity and food recommendations in my inbox. Otherwise, I would do a search on TripAdvisor using terms like “Panorama Route itinerary” and then a google search to pull up travel bloggers who have visited the area (“panorama route travel blog”). Then I get a lot of information to read through. Basically, the Panorama Route goes in a circle, so I plan on just hitting the stops on the map. When I post my itinerary when I get back from Africa, that will have specific details of everywhere and everything we did.
Step 5- More Flights!
Since that leg of the trip was fleshed out, next was the Cape Town portion. But during my initial research, I found that driving the Garden Route in Cape Town was a must in South Africa. The drive down to the Garden Route from Kruger would have been about 15 hours, so I decided to fly there. There are a lot of flights going from Johannesburg to Port Elizabeth for about $60-$100, so those are easy to book. The Garden Route leads into Cape Town, so I decided to drive to Cape Town and then fly back to Johannesburg at the end of the trip. Flights from Cape Town to Johannesburg are offered all day and also cost $60-$100. Since the drive from Kruger to the Johannesburg airport can take about five hours, I thought it would be best to book a flight in the morning so that if anything tripped us up during the drive, we wouldn’t have to worry about missing our flight.
Step 6 – Garden Route
Using the resources I mentioned in Step 4, I found that four days and three nights was a good amount of time to spend driving along the garden route to Wine Country. The areas people spend the most time are Tsitsikamma National Park, Plettenburg Bay, and Knynsa, so that’s where I decided to do overnights at hotels. I will detail the daily itinerary after I get back from the trip for specific details.
Step 7- Wine Country
South Africa has a really beautiful and well-known wine country. Sometimes people just do a daytrip from Cape Town, but I thought it would be fun to spend a couple of days in Franschhoek, since it was on the way from the Garden Route to the Cape Peninsula. I thought two nights would be a good amount of time to relax and explore all the wineries. There is also a wine tram that takes you to different wineries. Since I planned two nights here, I looked for an Airbnb in wine country.
Step 8- Cape Town
So “Cape Town” also includes the surrounding area outside of the city. This includes the famous penguin beach (Boulder Beach) which is located going towards the Cape Peninsula. The Cape Peninsula is also at the Southern end. Basically for me this means spending a night on this side. I did a lot of searches to find out a good amount of time to spend in Cape Town and not including the wine country, garden route, or peninsula, it looked like 4-5 days was a good amount of time. Things to do in Cape Town generally include Lions Head Mountain, Table Mountain, the waterfront, visiting the Nelson Mandela island, and visiting native South African townships. So I based my Cape Town itinerary around those things.
Step 9- Car Rental
So at this point, the shell of the itinerary is complete. I need a rental car at three different points (Johannesburg and Kruger area, Port Elizabeth to Cape Town, and the last two days after we fly back to the Johannesburg area). In my experience, there is never a company that actually stands out from the rest in terms of rental cars. They all pretty much have terrible reviews so you just have to hope for the best and make sure you don’t get sucked into purchasing all the add-ons and insurances you don’t need. Twice I will be renting from the Johannesburg airport, so I actually booked two different rental car companies so that if one sucks, I don’t have to use it twice. Generally to save money, it’s better to rent from outside of the airport and you can usually take a cheap Uber from the airport.
Be mindful on whether you are booking a manual or automatic since manual is the default normally. In South Africa, they drive on the left side, so it’s probably not a good idea to rent a manual car if you aren’t used to it since it will already be different driving on the left side. I have also read a lot that in South Africa, it’s bad to leave anything in your car, including something small like a phone charger, because it is likely your car will get broken into. We ended up going with a Rav4 since there might be rough terrain around the areas we are going.
I always check the car rental website (IE Budget) and then cheap 3rd party sites like Expedia, Orbitz, and Kayak to compare prices. Normally they will have some sort of promotion going on as well.
Step 10- Vaccines and Medicine
Lastly, you should look into what kind of vaccines or medication is required. For South Africa, vaccines are required when coming from some other African countries. If you are going to Kruger, that is in a Malaria zone (low risk though), so you have to decide if you want to take malaria pills (there isn’t a vaccine available). Malaria pills have a lot of possible side effects (nightmares, hallucinations, fever, nausea, dizziness, even brain damage and sometimes they aren’t even effective against malaria) so I am still deciding whether I want to take them or not. You also need to take them for weeks to be effective, not just a few days.
General Planning Tips
Finally, here are some general planning tips that I use when creating itineraries.
Tip 1- Gather Information as You Go: If you think you may be interested in visiting a city/country soon, save information whenever you find it. In my email, I have different folders labeled with different continents and will save articles/tips I find in there so that when I finally decide to go somewhere, I already have a whole lot of information available. I also will screen shot different things on my phone and put them in similar folders.
Tip 2- Do Some General Searches: Again, simple googling “South Africa blog,” “Best things to do in South Africa” or “South Africa Itinerary” can pull up itineraries already put together. TripAdvisor Forums will have a lot of good information as well. I also like going to popular tour group websites (G Adventures for example) and reading their itineraries. The more popular the country, the easier it will be to plan. For example, if you’re planning a trip to Italy and want to visit Venice, Florence, and Rome, it would be silly to pay someone else to plan that for you when there are so many blogs and itineraries about that specific route. I also like going to Instagram and either using a the hashtag or location of where I’m going to see real people’s photos in real time of what they are doing there and what it currently looks like. Another good tip is googling “how many days to spend in Cape Town,” so that you can get a rough idea on how much time to devote to each place.
Tip 3- Use Flight Resources: The Flight Deal, Skyscanner, Scott’s Cheap Flights, Secret Flying, TravelPirates are all resources that constantly post cheap flight deals daily. Also, the most obvious tool is using Google Flights to check the cheapest times to go somewhere and you can use Momondo to find those flights for even cheaper.
Tip 4- Look for Coupons: Orbitz, Cheaptickets, CheapoAir, Expedia, etc, always have some type of promotion going on and discount codes. So check all those sites before booking hotels and car rentals. As I mentioned, Airbnbs tend to be cheaper when booking multiple days/going with multiple people and you can usually find them in the most central locations. If you don’t like climbing up 5 flights of steps or don’t like staying places without air conditioning, read the descriptions closely before booking.
Tip 5- Think of What Will Be Most Popular for Your Trip and Book Things Around It: Here, like I mentioned, the safari is going to be the most popular so make sure you plan your itinerary around that first. This could be hotels if you are going somewhere during a holiday weekend, so book those first. It can be museums when going places in Europe. Going along with that, if you know something will be popular, don’t wait until you get there to get tickets. For example, people make that mistake when going to Amsterdam and thinking the Anne Frank House is somewhere you can just go up and easily get a ticket.
Tip 6- Exercise Responsible Tourism: So in Africa, you can definitely go ride an elephant or go pet a lion. But is it really worth contributing to the torture of these animals? Elephants have to be beaten into submission to allow humans to ride them, their spines weren’t meant to hold hundreds of pounds on their back, and they are often chained together and whipped. Lion cubs are stolen from their mothers and then drugged to let tourists pet them. The bulls at the “running with the bulls” events in Spain are locked in dark rooms, starved, drugged, and powder thrown in their eyes before being released and then eventually slaughtered. Do your research when it comes to doing any tourist attraction involving animals. It shouldn’t be worth contributing to animal cruelty and torture just for a selfie.
Hopefully some of these tips helped. I personally enjoy researching places I am planning on visiting. It helps getting excited about a trip and saving money. I know planning itineraries isn’t for everyone though. I will be posting my detailed South Africa itinerary when I get back from my trip.
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