The Travel + Leisure World’s Best Safari

Day: 1

Your adventure begins as you enplane for Africa.

Meals: None

Hotel: None

Add-Ons:  
Day: 2

“The whole town,” Captain Cook wrote in 1771 about Cape Town, “may be consider’d as one great Inn fitted up for the recreation of all comers and goers.” The great voyager may as well have been writing this week: Cape Town is one of the world’s jazziest, most fascinatingly multicultural and downright beautiful cities, a magnet for discerning goers and comers from six continents.

Meals: None

Hotel: One&Only
Day: 3

We’ll have an electrically relaxed few days to explore the city, based from the incomparable One&Only, set on the Victoria & Alfred Waterfront, a civic centre of colourful activity, looking up at Table Mountain, which we will summit via the famed Aerial Cableway, a spectacular bit of engineering in service to an even more spectacular view.

Meals: Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

Hotel: One&Only
Day: 4

We’ll wander out to the Cape Winelands for tastings and relaxed meals at places like the sublime Delaire Graff Estate. The Winelands charms us with brisk and picture-pretty little towns, a variety of refreshing activities, and lovely scenery reminiscent of Northern California’s Wine Country (except the craggy mountains that shoot up from its vineyards make Sonoma and Napa’s look rather… modest in comparison).

Meals: Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

Hotel: One&Only
Day: 5

And we’ll head over to the Cape of Good Hope, around which much of the world’s history once turned, and which a dissimilar cohort of creatures – including penguins, zebras, and ostriches – happily call home.

Meals: Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

Hotel: One&Only
Day: 6

Singita Kruger National Park, South Africa

Singita’s concession in talismanic Kruger was granted in 2001 in recognition of its fervent and effective commitment to conservation, and its dedication to creating an absolutely minimal environmental footprint. Singita’s 33,000-acre concession is an isolated haven of untroubled wilderness where a unique and species-rich wildlife population thrives across four distinct ecological zones, all of which we’ll get to know and admire during our stay.

Meals: Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

Hotel: Singita Kruger
Day: 7

Singita Kruger National Park, South Africa

Its two lodges, Singita Lebombo and Singita Sweni, were built to reflect Singita’s “touch the earth lightly” philosophy, which is entwined with every aspect of the lodges’ daily life. It is one reason these lodges are so respected and honoured – the other major reasons being their beauty and unobstrusive luxuriousness. In any case, Singita Kruger was recently voted by Travel+Leisure as the third-best hotel on planet Earth, an encomium that needs no expansion.

Meals: Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

Hotel: Singita Kruger
Day: 8

Sabi Sand Reserve, South Africa

A private, 45.000-acre game reserve, Sabi Sand adjoins Kruger National Park to the west, and by common agreement, is one of South Africa’s wildlife-richest, most unsullied regions. Within the Sabi Sand is Singita Private Game Reserve, the oldest private game reserve in the country, owned and lovingly preserved since 1926 by the Bailes family. Ebony Lodge, Singita’s first in the Sabi Sand stands comfortably amongst enourmous trees on the banks of the Sand River in the heart of South Africa’s big-cat country. Its thoughtful blending of European tradition and African boldness results, rather magically, in the down-to-earth warmth of a much-loved family home.

Meals: Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

Hotel: Ebony Lodge or Boulders Lodge
Day: 9

Sabi Sand Reserve, South Africa

And Boulders – like Ebony, a consistant high-ranker in T+L best lists – also set along the banks of the Sand River in Singita’s privately owned reserve wintin the Sabi Sand, is a brilliant architectural complement to the boulders on which it rests.

Meals: Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

Hotel: Ebony Lodge or Boulders Lodge
Day: 10

Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe

“Poor Niagara,” Eleanor Roosevelt supposedly said upon viewing Brazil and Argentina’s Iguazu Falls. Had she gazed on Victoria Falls – the greatest curtain of water on earth, 60 tumultuous feet higher than its South American rival – the famously articulate First Lady might have been struck speechless.

Meals: Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

Hotel: Royal Livingston Hotel
Day: 11

Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe

Victoria Falls is a waterfall like no other, and during our stay at the legendary Royal Livingstone Hotel (another perennial T+L best) we’ll get to know the Falls, from early-morning, coffee-sipping views from our room’s veranda of the almost 1,000 feet of mist that rise from the watery cauldron to lazy afternoon sundowners near its dramatic precipice, contemplating what the greatest travel writer of all time, Richard Halliburton, called “a hurricane of bursting water… that seems to fall up,not down.”

Meals: Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

Hotel: Royal Livingstone Hotel
Day: 12

We fly from the Falls to Johannesburg and connect with our international flight home, arriving on Day 13.

Meals: None

Hotel: None
Day: 13

We relax on our flight home, remeniscing on the wonders of our travels.

Meals: None

Hotel: None

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