Method
Five rules, and the arithmetic behind them
Every route on this site follows them. Where we break one, we say which and why.
1. Three nights per camp
Two nights is one full day: you arrive in the afternoon, you have one proper day, you leave after the morning drive.
Three nights is two full days, and the second is reliably better than the first. You know the ground, the guide has worked out what interests you, and you have stopped photographing the first zebra you see. Almost nobody regrets a third night; a great many people regret a fourth camp.
2. Bush first, coast second
A safari costs you sleep and gives you adrenaline. A coast gives the sleep back. In that order the second half repairs the first; in the other order you arrive at the safari rested and fly home wrecked.
The transition also works better. Hammock to 6am game drive is a shock. Game drive to hammock is the best afternoon of the fortnight.
3. Three bases maximum, in fourteen nights
Because of what a move actually costs:
| What you lose | Roughly |
|---|---|
| The morning drive on departure day | Half a morning |
| Packing, transfer, flight, transfer | Three to five hours |
| Settling in at the other end | The afternoon |
| The guide who was learning what you like | Not recoverable |
| The flight | A real line on the quote, not a rounding error |
Most of a day, every time, plus money. Three moves in ten nights is three days of a ten-day honeymoon.
4. Contrast, not coverage
Two genuinely different regions beat three that overlap. The test is simple: on arriving at the second place, does it feel like the first one again?
| Contrast | Repetition |
|---|---|
| Mara conservancy → Laikipia | Mara reserve → Mara conservancy |
| Serengeti → Zanzibar | Masai Mara → northern Serengeti |
| Volcanoes → a Kenyan conservancy | Two Serengeti camps in the same season |
| Samburu → the coast | Two beach hotels on the same coast |
5. Nothing on the anniversary day
If there is a date that matters — the wedding anniversary falling inside the trip, a birthday, anything — that day should contain arriving somewhere or being somewhere. Not a flight, not a transfer, not a 5am start.
It is the easiest thing in the world to arrange in advance and impossible to fix once the flights are ticketed.
When we break a rule
Two nights somewhere is defensible when the place is a one-thing destination — a gorilla trek, the Crater rim — where the second full day would genuinely have nothing to do.
Four bases in fourteen nights is defensible when one of them is a city night either side of an international flight, which is a hotel rather than a base.
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