Two weeks in South Africa
Two weeks is the sweet spot for a first trip. Enough for Cape Town, the Garden Route, and a safari, without the whole thing becoming a relay. Here's the split that works for most people, and the variations when your priorities differ.
The default 14 days
- Days 1 to 4, Cape Town. Table Mountain, the peninsula day, the city, and one Winelands day. Four nights, one of them kept as a buffer for the mountain if the weather turns.
- Days 5 to 9, the Garden Route. Five nights, slow. Base in Wilderness or Knysna rather than moving every night. This is the part of the trip that's actually a road trip.
- Days 10 to 12, safari. Fly from George or Port Elizabeth to the Kruger gateway, or fold Addo in on the eastern end of the Garden Route if you'd rather not fly. Two or three nights.
- Days 13 to 14, Johannesburg or coast. Fly home out of Johannesburg. If your flight allows, one night there for the Apartheid Museum on the way through.
If you want more safari
Swap the Garden Route for three Kruger nights plus the Panorama Route. You lose the coast and you gain the lowveld. For a lot of people who came for the animals, this is the better trip.
If you want more coast
Drop the fly-in safari and do Addo on the eastern end of the Garden Route instead. Malaria-free, two days, no flight, and the elephants are the easiest big-game payoff in the country for the effort.
The thing not to do
Don't try Cape Town, the Garden Route, Kruger, and the Drakensberg in fourteen days. You'll spend half the trip in a car or a plane and you'll remember the transfers. Two weeks wants two regions done well, or three done at a stretch. Four is a different, longer trip.
How it actually flows
The reason this split works is that it moves in one direction. Cape Town, then east along the coast, then north to the bush, then home. No backtracking. Every day you're somewhere new, and you never spend a whole day getting back to somewhere you've already been. That's the whole trick of a good two-week trip: keep it moving forward.