How many nights do you really need on safari?

The question usually arrives about ten minutes into a first conversation, once the polite bit is over. Someone has a fortnight, or nine days, or a stubborn number of annual leave days that will not stretch, and they want to know how many days, or nights, to hand over to the bush.

Four nights. That's our usual answer for a first safari in South Africa, and we'd spend them in one very good private reserve in the Greater Kruger without moving. Three can work if you arrive on time. Five is a treat. Seven is not ridiculous if you already know you love this. Two is pushing it, and we'll tell you so.

That's the short version. The longer version is more interesting, because the honest answer has less to do with how many nights you book and more to do with what happens to you around the third morning.

The maths nobody does

Think in drives, not nights. Most lodges send you out on two game drives a day: once as the sky goes grey before sunrise, and once in the mid-afternoon, coming home in the dark with a blanket over your knees and a spotlight sweeping the road. Arrive in time for the afternoon drive on your first day and leave after the morning one on your last, and three nights gives you six drives. Four gives you eight. Five gives you ten.

Six drives is enough to see a great deal. Eight is where most people stop counting, and that is rather the point.

What actually happens on the third morning

Day one, you're counting. Every drive is a test the bush has to pass. Where are the lions. Is that a leopard or a log. You photograph an impala with the intensity of someone who has never seen an antelope and may never see one again.

By day two you have stopped photographing impala.

And then somewhere around the third morning, something shifts, and it is the reason we say four. You stop scanning and start watching. You notice the giraffe is watching you back. You clock the hornbill who has decided breakfast on your deck is his now. Your guide goes quiet mid-sentence because he has heard something you have not, and instead of asking what, you go quiet too. You realise you haven't looked at your phone since yesterday and can't remember where you left it.

Wildlife doesn't run to a timetable. Four nights is roughly how long it takes to stop minding. Book three and you'll get there on your last morning, which is a slightly cruel place to arrive. Book four and you get a whole day of it.

Is three nights enough?

Yes, with one condition. The trap with three nights isn't the bush, it's the arrival. Land at the lodge at four in the afternoon after travelling since dawn and you have missed that day's game drive in all but name. Your three-night safari has quietly become a five-drive safari, and you'll spend the first of those trying to stay awake in a moving vehicle with the wind in your face.

Arrive fresh by lunchtime and three nights is a proper safari. We have planned plenty of them for people who had a week in South Africa and wanted the Cape as well.

Two nights we'll do if we must. It is technically a safari. It is also a very expensive way to feel rushed.

When five or more is the better call

Five is our number when the safari is the reason for the trip rather than one part of it. The countdown disappears altogether. You can skip a drive without guilt, ask for the walking option, spend a morning in a hide with a flask, or sleep until an hour that would scandalise your guide.

Seven is where splitting between two lodges starts to make sense. Not because one reserve runs out of things to show you, but because two properly different places begin to earn the move: somewhere with the leopard reputation of the Sabi Sand, then somewhere quieter and wilder where you might not see another vehicle all day. Below seven nights, we'd still usually rather you stayed put.

One lodge or two?

For four nights, one. We know the appeal of seeing two properties, and we know how good the second one looks on its website.

But count what a move actually costs. A morning drive cut short so you can pack. A road or air transfer through the middle of the day. Arriving somewhere new and learning where everything is again. A new guide and tracker who don't yet know you've already seen elephant twenty times and are quietly desperate for a wild dog. Do that in the middle of four nights and a quarter of your safari has gone on logistics.

Stay, and something else happens. By the second evening your guide is planning around you. He knows you'd rather sit with one herd for an hour than tick off five species before coffee. He knows you haven't seen a leopard yet and he's taking it personally. That only comes with days, not drives.

If you have a strong reason to split four nights, we'll help you do it well. We'd just like to hear the reason first.

The night in Johannesburg that nobody writes about

Here's the part that gets left out of almost every guide. If you have the time, we often suggest overnighting in Johannesburg on the way in.

Picture two versions of the same traveller. The first lands after a night in the air, trots across the airport for a connecting flight, bumps down onto a small airstrip, gets into a vehicle, and is at the lodge by mid-afternoon with just enough time to change and go out. They spend that first drive fighting to keep their eyes open, and they can't tell you afterwards what they saw. The second lands, is collected, and is asleep in a proper bed in a quiet Sandton garden by early evening after a proper dinner. The next morning they travel north rested, arrive in time for lunch, and are wide awake in the vehicle when the light goes gold.

Same flights, same lodge, same money, same suitcase. One of them has a four-night safari. The other has three and a half.

The Johannesburg night does other quiet work too. It gives a wandering suitcase a day to catch up with you. It means a delayed inbound flight is an inconvenience rather than a collapsed chain of connections. It gives you one unhurried evening to find out what a South African wine list looks like. And it turns Johannesburg from a place you pass through with your head down into the first easy night of the holiday. We have a soft spot for a small boutique property in Sandton that does this job beautifully.

Safari nights are not the same as trip nights

One more thing, because it causes more confusion than anything else. When people ask "how long do I need", they usually mean one of two different questions. How many nights on safari is the question this piece answers, and the answer is around four. How long the whole South African trip should be is a separate answer, because Cape Town wants its own time, so do the Winelands and the coast, getting in and out eats days, and jet lag has opinions of its own.

If you're combining the bush with the Cape, we have written separately about how long a whole trip should be and about whether to do Cape Town before or after the bush. The short version is that the safari part doesn't get longer just because the trip does. It gets protected.

What we'd tell a friend

If it's your first safari and you can stretch to it, spend four nights in one private reserve in the Greater Kruger and don't move. If you can only manage three, arrive by lunchtime and you'll be fine. If you've got a spare day, spend it in Johannesburg on the way in, not tacked on at the end. And if you've got six or seven nights, ring us, because that's a different and rather more enjoyable conversation.

Tell us how long you've got and what you're hoping to see, and we'll tell you honestly what four nights will and won't do for you. Our South Africa safari page is a good place to start, or just get in touch.

Vikki Jackson is co-founder of Marula Hill Travel. We plan boutique safaris across South Africa, Botswana, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, Uganda, Namibia, and Mozambique. We visit every lodge we sell.