How Much Our One Month Safari Road Trip Cost in South Africa

I love to know what other people spend on trips. This is a look behind the scenes. How much did accommodation cost? What did we spend on food? I love to know what our trips cost and I enjoy sharing that with you! Here is our most recent trip: How Much Our One Month Safari Road Trip Cost in South Africa.

I am a number cruncher. I love knowing exactly how much things cost and how the value of those items feels. Friends know how much I use my calculators and I usually have one close by.

Figuring out how much our one month safari road trip budget cost in South Africa is a particularly interesting budget, I think. We are very fortunate and this is our second trip to South Africa. Prior to going to South Africa, I had just assumed everything would be expensive. Very expensive. I lumped the entire continent of Africa into one big destination I would probably never go to.

Well, like most assumptions, they are riddled with false beliefs, assumptions, inaccuracies, and gosh knows whatever other stereotypes we get in our heads. And we have now spent about five months in 11 countries in Africa so far. Ah!

For us here in North America or the geographic equivalent, yes, the plane ticket to South Africa is expensive. There’s no way around that (except with air miles or hacking off bits of money with sign up bonuses for other accounts) but I am saying regardless, it’s a long flight.

Once you get that long journey out of the way, there are a lot of ways you can budget travel in South Africa, especially if you like camping.

This budget is separated out for the total cost with and without plane tickets. I did that because depending on where you live in the world, the price of a plane ticket to South Africa can vary greatly. We met a guy from the Netherlands – who’s an amazing photographer (you can check out his work here!) and he goes to South Africa usually at least once a year and this trip was his seventh trip. It’s an easy overnight flight and he used to get round-trip tickets for around $600 USD. We didn’t have any miles to use up and our plane tickets cost $2628.

That’s a big difference just because of geographic location which is why I did the budget with and without plane tickets.

Without further ado….drum roll….in USD here is what we spent for –

How Much Our One Month Road Trip Cost in South Africa:

Food >>> $651

Health >>> $165

Accommodation >>> $1057

Transportation >>> $1035

Personal >>> $15

Utilities >>> $10

Entertainment >>> $1035

Tips >>> $85

Plane >>> $2628

Total without plane tickets >>> $4053

Total with plane tickets >>> $6681

Total Per Day w/o Plane Tickets >>> $135.10/day>>>per person >>> $67.55pp/per day

Total Per Day w/ Plane Tickets >>> $222.70/day >>> per person >>> $111.35 pp/per day

Part of me feels like, oh gosh, I feel self-conscious sharing that because that is a large amount of disposable income to be able to go on this trip.

From another perspective, it’s often hard to find a 10-day safari offer for less than that price PER person. So many safari offers are easily between $6000-$10,000 PER PERSON! So that we pulled off all we did for a grand total of A MONTH for TWO PEOPLE at $6681 for everything feels amazing.

We felt we had a rather luxurious trip by our standards. About a quarter of our trip was spent in some sort of accommodation that was not our tent! As I’ve said before, Matt Kepnes talks about in his book, How to Travel the World on $50 a Day, travel is super personal. We could have spent way more and we could have spent way less. We did the things we thought were interesting and wanted to do on this trip.

*One note this budget is quite a bit higher than our previous trip (which sadly I don’t have the exact breakdown.) We knowingly spent more trying to increase our odds of seeing the mammals we were hoping to see. If we replicated our last South Africa trip from Cape Town to Johannesburg mostly camping we could have probably cut this amount spent in half.

Notes about the trip.

Food:

This was not a food trip. People asked us how the food was and what we ate.

Our response was: this was not a food trip.

Here was a good day – grocery shopping! This means we had fresh fruit and veggies for at least the next two days.

We did not have a cooler or refrigeration for most of the trip – essentially we were eating backpacking food. Think long shelf-life items and meals. Example: pasta with a can of mixed veggies, as those would not go bad. Forgoing milk in the coffee and using powered milk or just sugar. This is a super old post I wrote, but it gives you an idea of the backpacking food we would eat.

Health:

We did spend $165 for a plan from IMG. I like IMG’s insurance options and we have used them before.

Accommodation:

There was a good bit of comfort on this trip – a week in places with a roof over our heads! Quite the upgrade from the tent.

We slept in clean and nice budget rooms, nice chalets, a 10-person cottage, and our tent. We were in the 10-person cottage at Marrick Safari because flooding damaged the normal cottage we were supposed to stay in. The cottage was so big!

Most of our reservations were made directly through South Africa National Parks. We also use Agoda a lot for booking other accommodation.

A note about camping – because most people ask.

No – we are not just camping out in the middle of nowhere where a lion might eat us. Camping in the National Parks is a very calm and extremely regulated activity. We are inside a fenced-in rest camp. There are very strict gate times you have to return to the rest camps. This list has a ton of the gear we buy and love when we are doing all this camping.

If you are curious, I made an in-depth video of Twee River Rest Camp in the Kalahari. We think the camping in South Africa National Parks is some of the best camping in the world.

Transportation:

The tiny adventure Kwid definitely was not a hill climber, but it was very economical! As much as we would have loved a bigger vehicle, they cost so much more to rent and are so much more expensive to run.

We drove just under 4000 miles! So we were really happy with our transportation costs!

There were so many rental cars at the Johannesburg airport! They gave us keys and said go find your rental car. Just kidding! It was all labeled and very organized.

Breakdown:

Car Rental including road tolls: $625.16

Gas/Petrol: $409.81 (we thought that was amazing)

(Holy cow – could you imagine how much more petrol would have been if we had a truck!?!?!)

Another question people usually ask is: But ah, how was the driving?! Isn’t it scary?

Answer: No scarier than driving here.

They drive on the left over there and almost always manual transmission. I am so grateful I learned how to drive a manual when I was young! Just like riding a bike now.

You get used to the driving. The driver is always in the middle. The main roads are much like driving here. Chris downloads Google Maps for offline and away we go. Simple as that.

Plus when we are driving ourselves we get front-row seats to beautiful views like this:

Personal:

We bought some guidebooks.

Utilities:

I wasn’t sure how to categorize this, but we spent $10 bucks on Skype for phone calls. Most people and businesses are using WhatsApp now – which is fantastic. If you are not using WhatsApp – start.

There were one or two numbers we needed to call that did not have WhatsApp. With Skype you can make these calls for pennies. We also needed to call back to our USA bank at one point. It’s possible to call 800 numbers for no charge using Skype. All of this is very convenient and yet another way travel is so much easier than it was many years ago.

WhatsApp works in combination with your phone so make sure you get started with it before you leave your home country. Anyone with WhatsApp can call another person anywhere in the world with WhatsApp. Very easy. We also use this in the Maine Woods where we work in the winter as most of us have no cell service out there.

Tip: If you are traveling internationally make sure you turn on wifi calling for your phone!

Do you know we only pay $18.20 per month for our phone plan with unlimited texts and unlimited minutes? We pay $218.46 all at once to get that savings. If you want to get out switching to Tracfone you can use our referral code (VNBN-7587) and get some extra points when you join the rewards program!

Entertainment:

Most of the entertainment costs were night drives. We went on this trip with specific intentions and hopes of trying to spot some more elusive nocturnal creatures. Specifically, the aardvark, aardwolf, and caracal. (And we did see all those plus more!)

In any park, reserve, or game farm, your only option is to pay to have guides take you. Night drives typically cost more than regular day game drives.

Least expensive night drive was $32.55 per drive.

Most expensive night drive was $191.78 per drive. (And we went twice!)

If you weren’t quite as keen on night drives as we were, one could in theory have cut this cost down further.

This cost also includes the Wild Card. Every visitor pays a daily conservation fee when they are in a South African National Park. This is in addition to any camping fees. Always do the math, but pretty much if you are going to spend five or more days in a national park, (especially Kruger), it is a big cost savings to get the Wild Card.

Wild Card Cost: $329.41

Game Drives: $705.59

Tips:

After all these years tipping still can cause me a bit of stress.

Do your best. We would ask others around us what they were doing. The one place we asked the owners for some guidance on what was a ballpark standard.

We have found asking what is customary to be a well-received question.

When in doubt, it’s always appreciated to leave a little something.

Plane Tickets:

Ah. I feel like some others are so good at having free flights they can boast about. For all the traveling we do, we usually only fly to a destination once or twice a year. Then we just stay there usually a month or longer.

We don’t do a whole lot of numerous jet setting and it actually takes us a good while to acquire airline points.

Sometimes we have been able to use points, but more often it is better deal to just book with skyscanner.

That said we did sign up for the in-flight special credit card offer. So hopefully we will rack up some good points with that. If you want to try for points, this card has a signup bonus and is the card we are currently using to do the same thing!

Total:

So when I look at the total, especially without the plane tickets, I’m like, dang. I think we got incredible value out of this trip. It’s always hard to estimate how much a trip like this will really cost. Gas is such a variable. Food. Other unknowns.

But for about $2K each (without plane tickets) we both had a month of incredible safari experiences in South Africa.

Other Considerations:

Prior to going to Africa, specifically South Africa, I would have never thought self-travel could be so easy and affordable. We have now on two occasions spent a month driving ourselves around South Africa. Both times trips were almost exclusively to get from point A to B and explore the national parks. For this purpose, we had absolutely fantastic experiences. We used all the normal common-sense advice and never blinked an eye.

What do you think of How Much Our One Month Safari Road Trip Cost in South Africa? Does this budget surprise you? Seem like a lot? Would you have thought this was a good deal? 

I cannot reiterate enough that to travel and how one travels is completely up to the person. Everyone has a different travel style they enjoy. Everything we did on this trip was by choice and we enjoyed everything we did. To have the ability to travel whether it’s 20 minutes down the road or 20 hours to another country is a privilege. We are grateful for the opportunities to experience this world both near and far. Thanks for coming along.

Like this post?

Also check out:

HOW MUCH OUR 2 MONTH USA ROAD TRIP COST

HOW TO SEE POLAR BEARS ON A BUDGET IN CHURCHILL, CANADA

Or this post:

MINDSET OF CRUNCHING NUMBERS

And this post is an oldie that is just pure gold. Entertainment does not have to cost a lot:

CAMPGROUND ENTERTAINMENT

*At the time of writing the exchange rate was 18 ZAR to 1 USD. Credit cards were accepted almost everywhere and for everything. We paid for almost everything with our fee-free credit card. Each year we make hundreds of dollars by signing up for credit card bonuses.

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