Planning a first safari in East Africa

How many days you actually need

The three day trip is real, not a compromise. Our Virunga Gorilla Express lands in Kigali, drives two hours to a lodge near Kinigi, treks the next morning and is back at the airport on day three, from USD 2,180. It works because Rwanda put its gorilla park two hours from an international airport.

Beyond that, the useful bands are six to eight days for one country done properly, ten to twelve for a country plus the coast, and sixteen if you are crossing borders. A seven day trip that visits four parks is a driving holiday with animals at the edges.

• Three days: one gorilla trek, Rwanda, Kigali round trip
• Six to eight days: one country, two or three parks, no rushing
• Ten to twelve days: one country plus Zanzibar, or primates plus savannah
• Eleven to sixteen days: two to four countries, with regional flights

Pick the season before you pick the lodge

Each country has a different best window, and they do not line up. If your dates are fixed, read along your month instead of down the column, and let that choose the country.

Permits set your dates, not the lodges

If a gorilla trek is in the trip, the permit is the scarce thing and everything else bends around it. Eight trekkers per family per day is a hard cap, and Volcanoes National Park has twelve habituated families, which puts the whole park under a hundred permits a day in a peak season that runs June to September.

We hold permits before invoicing the rest of the trip, and in Bwindi we book the lodge against the sector the permit is for, because the four sectors are hours apart by road.

Road time is what first-timers get wrong

Distances on an East African map do not translate into hours the way they would at home. These are real figures from our own itineraries, and they are worth reading before you decide a route looks easy.

• Kigali to the gorilla trailhead at Kinigi: about 2 hours by road
• Nairobi to the Maasai Mara: 5.5 to 6 hours by road, or 45 minutes by air from Wilson
• Nairobi to Amboseli: about 4.5 hours
• Entebbe to Lake Mburo: about 4.5 hours, and the return leg from Bwindi is an 8 to 9 hour day
• Kihihi to Entebbe by scheduled flight: about 90 minutes, replacing that drive
• Ngorongoro rim to the central Serengeti: about 4 hours, via Olduvai Gorge
• Serengeti to Arusha by scheduled flight: about 2 hours, which is why we fly out rather than drive back

What a quoted price includes, and what it does not

Our journey prices are lead-in figures per person sharing a twin or double room, confirmed on enquiry. The pattern of what sits inside them is consistent across every journey, and so is the pattern of what does not.

• Included: permits and park fees, a private 4x4 with a pop-top roof and a driver-guide, accommodation, full board in the parks and breakfast at city hotels, bottled water in the vehicle, and airport transfers
• Not included: international flights, visas and any electronic travel authority fees, travel insurance, tips, drinks other than bottled water, porter hire at the trailhead, and optional extras such as a balloon flight or a second gorilla permit

Insurance is the one line not to skip

Travel insurance including medical evacuation cover is excluded from every journey price on this site, which means it is a decision you have to make yourself rather than one that happens by default. You are going to spend time hours from a hospital, on foot, on volcanic slopes and in open vehicles. Buy the cover.

The order we would book in

• Decide gorillas, migration, or both
• Fix the dates, against the season table above
• Hold the permits, with the Bwindi sector named if it is Uganda
• Agree the route and the number of nights per park
• Book lodges and camps against the sectors and the herd forecast
• Buy travel insurance with medical evacuation cover
• Book international flights last, once the trek date is confirmed