First safari · 6 min read
How many days do you need on safari?
Three days is enough to justify the flights if you commit to one reserve. Most of the disappointment we hear about comes from trying to fit six places into five days.
By the Citrus Tour Safaris team
The mistake almost everyone makes first
The instinct on a first safari is to see as much as possible, and it is the wrong instinct. Every additional destination costs you a driving day, and driving days are not game-viewing days. A five-day trip covering four parks gives you roughly one useful morning in each; the same five days across two parks gives you time to find things, wait for them, and go back.
The animals do not perform on schedule. What produces the memorable sightings is time — sitting with a cheetah that is clearly building towards a hunt, following a pride through a morning, returning to a leopard in the afternoon. Compressed itineraries buy you none of that.
Three days
Enough, if you commit to one reserve. Three days in the Maasai Mara — arriving on the first afternoon, a full day in the middle, and a morning drive before the road back — gives you four game-viewing sessions in the best big-cat reserve in Kenya. That is a genuine safari.
Three days spread across three parks is not. It is a great deal of driving with a game drive attached to each end.
Five to seven days
This is the sweet spot for a first trip, and where most of this catalogue sits. Five days lets you combine the Maasai Mara with the Rift Valley lakes, or Lake Nakuru's rhino with the Mara's cats. Six adds Amboseli for elephants and Kilimanjaro. Seven allows a proper Tanzanian northern circuit, or a Kenyan route that reaches north to Samburu.
At this length you get two nights in the principal reserve rather than one, which is the single most valuable upgrade available on a short trip.
Ten days and beyond
Ten days opens up the combinations that are genuinely hard to beat: Kenya and Tanzania together, a northern circuit followed by Zanzibar, or a Ugandan loop taking in gorillas, chimpanzees and savannah wildlife.
At this length pacing becomes the thing to watch rather than coverage. A thirteen-day itinerary with a move every single day is exhausting in a way that does not show up on the page. Build in at least two places where you stay put for two nights.
How long in each place
As a rule: two nights minimum in any reserve that justified a long drive to reach, three in your principal destination, and one night is only ever sensible for a place that is genuinely compact or that you are passing through anyway. Lake Nakuru and Lake Manyara are small enough to cover well in a half day. The Maasai Mara, the Serengeti and Bwindi are not.
