South Africa

South Africa has two climates running in opposition. The interior and the lowveld — Kruger, the Waterberg, the Drakensberg — have summer rainfall and dry winters. The Western Cape has the reverse: dry summers and wet winters. So the best month for Kruger is one of the worst months for Cape Town, and vice versa.

For game viewing, come in the dry winter: May to September. The reasons are mechanical. The bush thins, the grass dies back and sightlines open up. Surface water disappears, so animals come to the rivers and the remaining waterholes at predictable times. Mosquito numbers fall, which drops the already-low malaria risk in Kruger close to negligible. And the mornings are cold and clear, which is excellent for photography and unpleasant on an open game vehicle before sunrise — take a beanie, and take it seriously.

For the Cape, come in the dry summer: November to March. Long evenings, swimmable water on the False Bay side, the wine estates at their best, and Table Mountain clear more often than not. The catch is the south-easter — the wind locals call the Cape Doctor — which in December and January can blow hard enough to close the cable car for days on end. Cape Town in June and July is genuinely wet and cold, and while the city is lovely in the rain, the beaches, the hikes and the coastal drives are the reason you came.

The compromises are the shoulder months, and they are better than their reputation. April, May, September and October give you decent game viewing and decent Cape weather simultaneously. If you must do both regions in one trip, that is where to put it — and if the trip has to be in December or January, we would build it around the Eastern Cape reserves rather than Kruger, because they work year round.

Some things have their own calendar and are worth planning a whole trip around. Southern right whales come into the bays along the Cape south coast from roughly July to November, peaking in September, and at Hermanus and De Hoop you watch them from the cliffs without a boat. The Namaqualand and West Coast wildflower bloom is an August-to-September event and one of the great floral spectacles on earth, entirely dependent on winter rainfall. Sardine run activity off the KwaZulu-Natal coast happens in the winter months. Impala lambing in Kruger is a November-to-December event and brings predators with it. And the Drakensberg gets snow in winter, which is a strange and beautiful thing to find in Africa.

South African tar is as good as anything in southern Europe. The N1 north from Cape Town, the N2 along the coast, the N4 east towards Kruger — all dual carriageway or good single lane, well signposted, with frequent service stations. Fuel is available everywhere, attended rather than self-service, and the attendant will check your oil and clean the windscreen; a small tip is customary. Cards work almost universally.

You do not need a 4x4 for a standard South African itinerary, and this is worth saying clearly because people over-specify and overpay. Kruger's main roads are tar and its loop roads are well-graded gravel; a normal sedan handles the whole park. The Garden Route, the Winelands, the Panorama Route and the Drakensberg foothills are all tar. A high-clearance vehicle is nice on gravel and unnecessary on tar.

The places you genuinely do need four-wheel drive are specific and worth knowing. Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park’s dune roads between Nossob, Mata-Mata and Twee Rivieren want high clearance and 4x4, and the Mabuasehube side on the Botswana border is 4x4-only and fully self-sufficient. Sani Pass, the gravel switchback climb into Lesotho, is 4x4-only and the border post at the top is at 2,876 metres. The Baviaanskloof between the Eastern Cape and the Karoo is a proper 4x4 route. Swartberg Pass out of Prince Albert is spectacular gravel that a normal car can do carefully in dry weather and should not attempt in wet. And most private reserves in the Sabi Sand and Timbavati do not permit self-drive at all — you are in the lodge's vehicle with the lodge's ranger and tracker, which is the point.

Kruger's internal rules are strict and enforced, and they catch first-timers. Speed limits are 50 km/h on tar and 40 km/h on gravel. Camp gates open between roughly 05:30 and 06:00 depending on the month and close between 17:30 and 18:30, and arriving back late incurs a fine — the gate times are published at every camp and you should read them every morning, because they move through the year. You may not get out of your vehicle except at designated sites. In practice this means a Kruger day is: out at gate opening, back to camp for brunch, siesta, out again at three, back before the gate closes. The park is 350 kilometres long; at 50 km/h, distances between camps take much longer than the map suggests.

Two honest notes. Load-shedding — scheduled rolling power cuts — still occurs, and although most lodges and camps have inverters or generators, you should carry a power bank and a head torch and download your navigation offline. And South Africa has a high road fatality rate, concentrated at night on rural roads: livestock, pedestrians and unlit vehicles are the hazards. We ask guests not to drive between towns after dark, which is the same advice we give everywhere in the region but matters more here because the roads are good enough to tempt you.

South Africa's distances are large but the driving is easy, so you can cover more here than anywhere else on our list. Even so, the classic mistake is three regions in ten nights. Two regions done properly in fourteen nights is a far better trip.

• 4–5 nightsKruger National Park

  Four nights minimum, five if you can, and split your camps so you are not driving the same loops twice. Our standard shape: two nights in the south around Lower Sabie or Skukuza for the highest general game density and the best leopard chances, then two or three nights further north at Satara for lion on the S100, or Olifants for the view. If the budget allows one splurge, add two nights in a private Sabi Sand or Timbavati concession, where off-road driving and night drives are permitted and a tracker sits on the bonnet — it is a genuinely different product from the national park.

• 4 nightsCape Town & the Peninsula

  Four nights, and treat the weather as the schedule rather than the plan. The rule is simple: if Table Mountain is clear when you wake up, go up it that morning and rearrange everything else. The rest fills itself — the Cape Point drive via Chapman's Peak, Boulders Beach penguins, Kirstenbosch, the Bo-Kaap and District Six for the history that Cape Town's beauty can obscure, and a day in the Stellenbosch or Franschhoek winelands.

• 4 nightsThe Garden Route

  Do not do the Garden Route in two days. It is around 750 kilometres of coast from Mossel Bay to Storms River and the pleasure is in stopping: Wilderness lagoons, the Knysna heads, Tsitsikamma's suspension bridge and forest trails, De Hoop for land-based whale watching between July and November. Four nights, and consider returning inland on Route 62 through the Karoo for a completely different landscape rather than driving the same coast back.

• 3–4 nightsEastern Cape & Addo

  The answer to two problems at once: malaria-free Big Five, and a region that works in December and January when Kruger is thick and humid. Addo Elephant National Park is self-drive and excellent, and the private reserves around it — Shamwari, Kwandwe, Amakhala — offer guided game drives with no malaria conversation. Three to four nights, and it slots straight onto the end of the Garden Route.

• 4 nightsKgalagadi Transfrontier Park

  The one place in South Africa that feels like Botswana, because half of it is. Red dunes, camelthorn-lined dry riverbeds, black-maned lion, cheetah on the calcrete ridges and raptors in numbers you will not see elsewhere. Four nights minimum because it is a long way from anywhere — the drive up from Upington is substantial. 4x4 recommended on the dune roads, and the Mabuasehube side on the Botswana border is 4x4-only with full self-sufficiency. Best in March to May and September to October; the summer heat is severe.

• 3 nightsDrakensberg

  The mountain half of South Africa and consistently underbooked by international visitors. The Amphitheatre in the northern Berg, the hike towards Tugela Falls, San rock art in the Kamberg and Giant's Castle shelters, and snow on the peaks in winter. Three nights, and add a Sani Pass 4x4 day trip up into Lesotho if the switchbacks appeal.

• 2 nightsPanorama Route & Blyde River Canyon

  The natural approach to Kruger from Johannesburg rather than a destination in itself, and much better as two nights than as a rushed transit day. Blyde River Canyon, Bourke's Luck Potholes, God's Window and the waterfalls around Graskop. Mist is common; go early.

Less than anywhere else we work, which is exactly why it is the country we recommend for a first African self-drive. No convoy, no jerry cans, no satellite communicator, no recovery gear, no 4x4 for most routes. Fill up when you pass a station, use offline maps, and drive on the left.

The things it does ask are mostly about judgement rather than equipment. Do not drive between towns at night. Keep valuables out of sight and the car locked while driving in urban areas, and use secure parking — ordinary urban precautions, applied consistently. Take the malaria question seriously if you are going to Kruger in summer with young children, and know that the Eastern Cape and Cape reserves remove the question entirely. Carry a power bank for load-shedding. And book South African National Parks accommodation and the popular Garden Route towns well ahead if your dates fall in South African school holidays, because domestic demand, not international, is what fills this country.

The one thing we would push you on is not trying to do it all. South Africa's ease is a trap: because the driving is straightforward, people plan itineraries that look reasonable on paper and turn into three thousand kilometres in twelve days. Pick two regions, give each of them four or five nights, and fly the long leg between them — Johannesburg to Cape Town is two hours in the air and eighteen hours on the road, and there is no prize for the road.