 Has the thought of watching Timon & Pumba chasing each other's tails through the dusty African savanna been rolling around inside your head since the release of the Lion King 30-years ago? Or maybe it was the Planet Earth series narrated by the unmistakable baritone voice of David Attenborough that’s had you longing to experience one of the most diversified continents on the planet. For me, it was both. I have seen the cartoon and the Planet Earth series countless times. I had to go, I had to see it for myself.  In January 2022 we left on a 6-month African safari that included; snorkeling, private wildlife safaris, fishing for sharks, overlanding across various countries in a fully equipped 4x4 with rooftop tent, tastings at some of Africas' top wineries, dinner with elephants at wild watering holes, getting within pouncing distance of lion prides, hot air balloon rides, and countless life-changing experiences. Everything, absolutely everything for roughly $59usd / $80cad / $55euro at the time of conversion. I know this sounds like a late night infomercial where you pick up the phone and buy a set of highly discounted cookware that started off at $1599, but if you buy in the next 30-minutes you can get it for just five easy payments of $19.99, and we’ll throw in a set of oven mitts for free! Really though, I have nothing to sell here, well, I did write this great book about a motorcycle trip from Canada to Argentina you can buy on my website if you’re interested, otherwise, just a look into how we did Africa for $59 and you can too, no charge. Fifty-nine dollars, really? Tell me more… Because we love to travel and are willing to figure out the how-to VS what I typically hear, which is the how it’s not possible, I’m opening up the books to show you exactly how we survived a 6-month African honeymoon and what it cost. Actually, 6.5-months if you count the two weeks we spent in Aruba warming up before heading to South Africa. Now before you get all “I could never do that, I have a job and a house and a life”, I will open up with the fact that my wife, Angie, had never been on a six-month vacation/getaway in her life. At 40+ years old she figured out how to make it happen, mid-career, as a homeowner, and just married. I on the other hand have been on numerous multi-month and multi-year adventures before this and leveraged what I knew about long-term travel to fit into Angie's lifelong ability to be a responsible grownup with a full-time career. Over the course of 6.5 months we were able to travel through; Aruba, South Africa, Mozambique, Botswana, Namibia, and Egypt. The $59usd/day/person includes everything; food, lodging, visas, COVID tests, clothes, safaris, vehicle rental, fuel, shark fishing, tours, tipping, flights, phone bills, donations, and a coffee frother. More on the frother in a bit. Africa, why travel to Africa? To my surprise, one of the most common misconceptions about Africa I heard while trying to explain this adventure was that Africa is a continent just like North America or Asia, not a country. Africa is a collection of 54 countries according to the UN, or it might be 57, or was that 60? That will depend on what coup might be currently ruling one part of The Republic of Logone, The Republic of Somaliland, or Azawad, or some slice of land here and there that is under dispute. For me, it was all about the culture, the people & the wildlife. The path of least resistance to get there was to fly to South Africa, rent a truck with a rooftop tent, and hit the open road. In the south of Africa you can easily find game reserves, adventure, tribes still etching out an existence in mud huts, and subsistence farming as well as a host of tourist activities like wine tours, fishing, snorkeling, and world-class cuisine. For the most part, it can all be had at a huge discount compared to prices in North America and Europe. For example, we did a wine tasting on the famous Garden Route in South Africa one day. The tasting included five wine tastings and a selection of cheeses to complement the wines. When the bill came it was less than $10CAD for both of us. In Mozambique, we rented an upscale oceanside hut with bedding, kitchen, washroom, and bbq area. We stayed four days and went scuba diving one day, the total cost was under $200CAD. At this same place, fishermen would regularly stop by asking what type of fish we might want and what size. We would order a 1kg King Fish, the fisherman would head out with his spear and return a few hours later sporting a King Fish with a hole in it, clean it, and request $8 for their services, incredible!  On many occasions, we would just roll up to random bush-camping sites that had been recommended by other travelers. Often we would be treated to hippos bobbing up and down in the lagoons or rivers in front of us. Other times whole herds of elephants would come lumbering in from the dense bush to quench their thirst at a watering hole fifty feet in front of us. On some occasions, we’d wake up in the middle of the night to the sound of lions shaking the tent with their thunderous roars. Naturally, no one was falling back to sleep after these events, but if you like adventure, they are memories you’ll never forget. Ok, so how’d ya do it richy rich pants? Tell us all about how you won the lottery and spent all the money in Africa. Tell us how you sold your bitcoin stock, made millions and how we can do it too if we just sign up for your Easy Millions Program. Though we likely looked like millionaires as we rolled past tiny mud huts in northern Namibia in our Toyota 4x4 with our iPhones and digital cameras hanging out the window, back in Canada we’re still a few zeros short of millionaire status. At the very end of this article, I show the exact monthly dollar figures for everything.  The Trip: Flights: This trip kicked off in January 2022, marking the beginning of the end of global COVID-19 closures. That played a huge role in our ability to get to and not get to certain countries. At the time one of the few countries open for business to warm up, literally and figuratively, that we had not been to was Aruba. Honestly, I would have likely never even looked at Aruba if it wasn’t one of about four places we had the option to travel to and the flights were on sale! Cost per person one way from Edmonton, Alberta Canada to Aruba with WestJet Airlines $397.85cad/person ($295usd +/-). Paid for via travel points that had been racking up from the 2-years of non-travel. Cost $0. Really though, at less than $400, that’s not too bad. We did two weeks in Aruba staying at AirBnB’s for under $80/night and renting a car from the brother of a lady at one of our AirBnB’s. Emerita, our AirBnB host was an extremely outgoing and hospitable host who’d traveled the world performing and was presented with an award as one of Canada's most accomplished black women. We interviewed her and I’d highly recommend watching that video, especially if you are interested in Aruba. Aruba to Cape Town the choices were quite limited due to the lack of travelers, though I suspect cargo was still being flown around quite regularly as United Airlines had flights from the US-South Africa a couple of times a week. We could either fly KLM for $1500+ per person or United (never my first choice) for $974.20CAD ($725USD +/-) one way. It was considerably cheaper overall to buy a return ticket, but we knew we would not be flying back from South Africa. Economics won, we bought the United tickets, and 22 hrs of travel time later we arrived in Cape Town. Before boarding the plane I checked the number of seats available and it showed less than half were occupied. Prior to boarding in Newark, I asked if there was the option to get an entire row each as we were still wading our way through C19 and noted to the ticketing agent that it would be safer for all of us :) They moved Angie and I each to our own row in business class! Someone else tried this angle once on the plane with ticket in hand and was turned around and ushered back to economy. It’s best to start asking way before you want the problem solved. Again the flights were fully funded from travel points, cost $0 Windhoek Namibia to Cairo Egypt. We ventured through Namibia in June, a country mostly made up of desert. We were here in the colder winter months with night time temperatures hovering around freezing. It made for some cold camping and we opted to spend the last two weeks sweltering in the Egyptian summer where days would regularly hit over 40oC (105oF). Flights $705CAD/person ($526USD +/-). *Paid for via travel points. Cost $0. Cairo to Edmonton. The flights from Cairo to Edmonton could not have been more different from the original flights from Newark to Cape Town. Instead of an entire business class row, airports void of life, and the undivided attention of airline personnel, the world was back traveling in droves. Each flight, Cairo to Athens, Athens to Montreal, Montreal to Edmonton, was overbooked, understaffed, and wildly unorganized. On the plus side, we had seats on each flight, however, our luggage, along with thousands of other people’s, arrived two weeks after we did. Cost $679.10/CAD/person ($505USD +/-). *Paid for via travel points. Cost $0 If you added it all up it would look like this: $2756.15/CAD/person ($2055USD) for all flights. However, if you were just going to do a return trip to South Africa from Edmonton it is closer to $1250CAD ($935USD) at the time of writing and oddly about $150 more to go from Newark to Cape Town. Location and time of year always play a large role in the price. If you are going to cite a lack of credit card travel points as your reason for not being able to go, let's look at it like this. On the high side say your flights were $1400CAD round trip and you were going for 6-months. That’s 180-days divided by $1400 or $7.77CAD($5.80USD +/-) extra per day to pay for the flights. If fuel prices are low or currency is in your favor this can easily offset that cost over 6-months reducing or eliminating the price of the flights.  Renting vs Buying A Vehicle I looked heavily into buying a vehicle to drive around for the 6-months with the plan to sell it at the end. Many people do this and it’s a great way to essentially get a rental for free or for a huge discount over renting for such a long time. The thing that surprised me the most was the cost of used vehicles in South Africa. Where I could likely get a used, late model, domestic suv or pickup truck in North America with 4x4 equipped to do the job for $8-$20,000. In South Africa, we were looking at $15-$50,000 for used Land Rovers and Toyota Hilux’s. The price is irrelevant if you are selling it for about the same at the end, however, the biggest concern in my mind was if they closed the borders again and we had to hop on a plane home on short notice. Now I’d have a $25,000 chunk of metal hold up in a Botswana bush camp. After months of research and questions asked in various forums, we resolved to shell out the money on a rental. If you plan to buy you can check prices on sites like webuycars.co.za, or go into Facebook forums like Overlanding Africa or Overlanding Buy and Sell - Europe and Africa and ask around. Note: there are a lot of rules to buying a car as a foreigner you’ll need to know before showing up, learn them. In the end, I narrowed it down to a few reputable 4x4 rental sites in South Africa. Bushlore.com, the most popular and well-established agency with options to pick up and drop off at major cities and tourist hot spots around South Africa and across the southern part of the continent, as well as Bushtracker.com. Avis.co.za, and BERG 4x4 Rental.co.za. Prices on these sites are listed in the local currency, the Rand, and hover around $100CAD/day for a base model Toyota Hilux 4x4 fully kitted out with a tent, little fridge, and overlanding camping gear. You just need to pack your clothes and go! At $100/day over 180 days the $18,000 price tag evoked a sudden gag and puke in the mouth feeling. Granted if you were assuming $100/day for hotels this might be a great offset, I was not budgeting for $100/night hotel rooms for six months. Hoping for a better deal I sent out a few emails asking if there were any long-term discounts if we rented for over two months. Almost instantly BERG 4x4 replied and said they would love to have us and offered us 50% off! Wow, that’s huge. I didn’t even bother to follow up with the other companies and we took their deal. We booked a single cab 2016 Toyota Hilux 4x4 with a rooftop tent (the cheapest option they had) to be picked up in Cape Town and dropped off in Windhoek Namibia. I added to the negotiation that we could extend our two month initial deal in one month increments with 30-days notice for the same rate as we had planned for 6-months but didn't trust that the world would not close up in the meantime. Deal accepted. Two problems arose. Problem #1, I could not get our credit cards to work with their online payment system, and didn’t want them to think that we were going to try and rip them off. Two company representatives met us at our hotel in Cape Town with a debit machine where we paid a one month deposit to cover any potential damages and a two month rental. After the initial payment, we again could not get the online system to work when it came time to renew two months later. To my amazement, they floated our payment until the day we dropped off the 4x4. They literally had two random foreigners riding around in their 4x4 for several months unpaid. I would not have made this deal with us. Problem #2, the single cab 4x4 they rented us was not in Cape Town at the time of arrival however there was a quad cab unit available and they gave it to us for the price of the regular cab! A combination of 2-years of slow / non-existent sales combined with long-term rental alongside a little luck and we paid $54.50CAD/ day including rental, insurance, cross border fees, and a small premium to drop off in Windhoek rather than Cape Town. The overall timing of this deal played a role, though your length of rental and negotiation skills will too. Total cost $54.50CAD/day ($40USD +/-) or around $9800CAD($7324USD +/-). Looking at the final number you might think, $9800! Who has $9800 to spend on a car rental, well, you might. Read on for how we covered the cost.  Where Does The Money Come From and Other Sacrifices “Wow, it must be nice to afford to drop $15k on a holiday and nearly $10K on a car rental.” Yeah, I suppose it is nice, though it really doesn’t cost any more than what you are paying to be at home. I guess you could ask yourself, “Wow how do we afford to stay at home for 6-months for $14k and drop $10k on our car payments, insurance, and maintenance?” Work: To pay for all this we had to make a few sacrifices to pull it all together. For one, Angie worked countless doubles leading up to our departure, often leaving the house for work at 6:30am and getting home at 10:30pm only to wake up and do it all over again the next day. She definitely had more than a few mornings stumbling out of the house looking like a zombie. In short, she was able to take that 6-months she was going to be off work and add it to the year of work before we left to end up with 6-months of savings. I never stopped working. After my 2.5-year road trip from Canada to Argentina I decided I had to make my work schedule as flexible as possible and continued to work while on the road. Sometimes I worked for a few hours with a questionable cell phone connection tethered to my laptop for wifi in lion country. Other times we’d rent a place with wifi (when the power was actually working) and I’d work all day for three or four days before continuing on. House: We own a house, they’re expensive so we had to find a way to cover that expense. We opted to store most of our belongings in the garage & basement while we rented the main floor fully furnished, essentially dropping our home expenses to $0. We both drive vehicles that are paid for. Mine was actually a 98’ Ford E-150 with more rust than paint. Would you rather drive a rental car through Africa for 6-months or a brand new car with payments that sits more then it’s driven? We parked these and dropped the insurance to the minimum, costing a couple of dollars a day. Add up what it costs you to live including EVERYTHING (food, rent/mortgage, entertainment, insurance, bullshit you don’t need, etc) for one month with your current lifestyle. Is it more or less than $59USD / $80CAD/day? I’m almost certain it is over our daily budget for 6-months in Africa. Touristy Things: The upside to long-term travel is you can usually skip peak seasons and do touristy things for a discounted rate. Top of the South Africa touristy list is Kruger Park, a place I’d been to before. It’s an amazing wildlife reserve overflowing with animals. During peak season lodges and campgrounds can triple in price and be fully booked months in advance. We spent a week here in the off-season and camped the whole way, spending $30-$50/night for camping in a park where lodges can reach over $1000/night. Do you think the elephants at the $1000/night lodge and the elephants in our $30/night campground were any different? Well, the food and sleeping might have been, I’ll give them that. We wanted to do a hot air balloon ride. It was around $500/ each in South Africa. I learned you could do one in Egypt for $50 each. We went in Egypt. We splurged on a 60-minute helicopter safari around Maun Botswana for 6500 Pula or roughly $675CAD. It was incredible and a few hundred dollars less than the price of the local hot air balloon ride. We had some money given to us from our wedding, and still being as frivolous as we could, we aimed to squeeze every penny out of it too. That money paid for several nights in a 4-star treehouse accommodation on a wildlife reserve. It was cool, but I personally enjoyed some of the oceanside camping spots we stayed at more. Two weeks in Egypt including a 4-day 3-night Nile River cruise came to around $1500CAD. Egypt is insanely cheap. That is if you do most of your booking online. On the ground, the locals will rake you over the coals charging 10x, 20x, 100x the local rate. I’ve never seen a pushier sales culture in my life. Great people, but everything is leading up to the overpriced sale of one thing or another. We were able to cover this cost with honeymoon cash and left it out of the $59/day equation presented here. Lodging: We stayed in 72 camping spots and 15 AirBnB’s. The camping included everything from free bush camps in questionable locations including one night when we were awakened by two young men with shotguns. I exited the tent in only a pair of shorts with a knife in my back pocket hoping to use my mouth to avoid any issues rather than my pocket knife. Luckily they were extremely kind village park rangers and we were camped on their native lands illegally. We bargained over the price of the fine and they gave us a ticket letting us spend the rest of the night. Typically we camped in organized campgrounds. In the countries we visited, camping was incredibly popular, and finding a campground near the ocean with a pool, full facilities, and usually power was anywhere from $15-$30. It could not have been easier. AirBnB’s or sites like Booking.com accounted for the other 15 locations. With the Rand collapsing under horribly mismanaged governments, the price for a room was rarely over $50/night. If we needed a break from the road we could easily get a discounted room. As with anywhere, you could also find a franchise hotel or 5-star resort in a lot of places, it just cuts into the 6-month budget quite a lot faster.  Food: South Africa has excellent restaurants and is a culture of meat eaters. The national pastime is to Braai, or BBQ as we call it. Everywhere and anywhere you could spot a little cloud of smoke over a camp spot or backyard and then pick up the scent of sizzling fat over open coals across the country. I got so into the Braai culture that the day after we arrived back home I removed the propane tank and all gas fittings from our BBQ and it now runs exclusively on wood. Grocery stores were typically stocked with anything and everything and were easy to find, other than when we were in very remote areas.. Dining out was usually excellent and meals rarely exceeded $15CAD/person. Mozambique is kissed by the Indian Ocean entirely down one side. It’s a country of the most amazing fresh seafood and whatever vegetable you can grow in your backyard. Typically cassava or maybe rice. On one occasion we met a man who invited us to stay at his home deep in a countryside village. In the morning the neighbor climbed a tree and then presented us with fresh coconuts for breakfast. In more touristy locations enterprising fishermen were selling fish at incredibly low prices and you could negotiate where they would clean and sometimes cook it for you. Grocery stores were rare outside major centers and often had rice and dairy products, cookies etc, but usually no vegetables and limited meats. Most of the shopping was done in markets or roadside stalls selling fresh produce, cashews, and sometimes chunks of freshly slaughtered meats. Buying your own groceries equated to less than a couple of dollars a meal. Even a lunch for two of fresh fish and fried cassava was usually under $5CAD/person. Mozambique is one of the economically poorest countries in Africa, as a result, it’s incredibly cheap for foreigners. Botswana is a country of beef. There are a few large farmers and hundreds of independent farmers with small herds of cattle. For the most part, the cattle graze on native grasses ushered around by a couple of farmers until slaughter day. The meat is some of the best quality in the world with a large amount of it headed to export to Europe where it arrives duty and quota-free. It was unbelievably cheap. For $5-$8CAD we could buy a two pound beef tenderloin to toss on the Braai. We ate a lot of meat in Botswana. If you wanted to eat at a roadside stand that was usually offering some kind of beef or chicken stew alongside pap (a cooked cornmeal staple found everywhere) it was around $1-$2/person. Namibia is a mix of creatures harvested from the South Atlantic Ocean as well as locally harvested delicacies like ostrich, oryx, kudu, and a few things you might be surprised to find on your plate like giraffe and zebra. One thing I found interesting about our visit was at the beginning of the trip we were delighted to see all the wonderful animals running about, and near the end of the trip we were delighted to taste a lot of those animals. We tried the oryx, kudu, ostrich, zebra, and fresh fish (Angie caught in the ocean). For me, the oryx was the most delicious. A rich fatty meat that tasted amazing grilled to a nice medium rare. The zebra wasn’t bad either, a bit lean though. Dining out in Namibia on fresh seafood was usually under $20/person for dinner. Trying a few of the delicacies like zebra and kudu at a mid-range restaurant might be closer to $30/person. Picking up food at the grocery store worked out to be a few dollars a meal. The food in Egypt varied greatly from grilled lamb, hummus, pickled dishes, kebabs, and shawarmas. The food on the cruise was mediocre, but in the restaurants, it was pretty good. One night we took ourselves into a famous local restaurant Kebdet El Prince (The Prince Of Liver). If nothing else it was truly an entertaining evening where the staff made us feel like esteemed guests and had us order food for about 8-people. I tried the camel liver. I would say camel liver would rank higher as a novelty item, but not really something I’d rush back and try again. Overall the food in Egypt was flavourful and crazy cheap. You would need to work hard to spend $15/person on a meal in Egypt. Well, unless you forgot to ask the price first, then you might be presented with a bill for a $100 shawarma which you’d need to negotiate your way down to $8, just twice the local price.  The Exact Costs By Month These totals include everything, absolutely everything. Food, internet, lodging, fuel, food, drinks, paying to use the toilet, Dr. visits, medication, visas, tours, park passes, covid tests, park pass to see the penguins, donations we made to an orphanage, fishing tackle, everything! Was it all glitz and glam, maybe not. Ask my wife how much she enjoyed digging a hole for the bush bathrooms in lion country, life sleeping on the roof of a Toyota, and what her opinion is about the guy who constantly moaned about the price of a hand-crafted coffee from the shop vs brewing our own. Actually back to the frother comment from the start of this budget story. Angie found a loophole to my moaning about the price of coffee from the specialty shops and in her free time, from not having to work every day and aside from reading 31-books on the trip, she also constructed a fully mobile coffee bar including french press, almond milk, ground cinnamon, protein powder (various sized options), flavorings, and a frother. No shit, a double macchiato, with almond milk, half sweet, and a protein boost to go all while monkeys watched hanging from the trees overhead hoping to get one to go. Clever she is, very clever!
Was it all a cakewalk, no not everything of course, but the incredible experiences certainly outweighed the difficulties. Where do you go when you live in a tent and need your own space, the cab of the truck? To the lawn chair out front? Going for a walk alone in leopard country was rarely an option. Who handles the money? Well, I guess whoever needs to be spending it at the time. I personally thrive on budgets and tracking. When you are on your own, living or traveling and manage to meticulously maintain a budget you are considered organized. When you are traveling as a couple and you are in control of where the cash is, how much is being spent, and what the allotted amount per day is you might be considered a control freak. Hopefully one of you is a well organized control freak :) Was it safe? I guess that depends on what you’re scared of. A large bull elephant larger than our truck stopped while passing in front of us on a road one day. It turned and took one threatening lunge toward us then turned and went the other way. It scared the pants off of me! We were warned about certain areas to avoid on the ground and avoided them. Overall the people were unbelievably friendly. We were even invited to church one day at an orphanage we stumbled into in Namibia. We each had moments we loved and loathed. Angie loved listening to the animals at night and seeing them up-close during the daytime hours, surreal. She was amazed by the African sunsets, they’re stunning and last forever! As well as meeting the locals and learning more about their languages, culture, food, and ways of living. She did not enjoy the awful roads in certain places that made the truck and her teeth rattle. As mentioned earlier the bush bathrooms took some adjusting too and the lack of easily accessible clean water can sometimes be hard to find. One of the more frustrating incidents for us and locals of South Africa alike was “Loadshedding”. Basically, the country is poorly managed on another level of unbelievable. They are unable to control their use of power and to help cope the country just shuts off the power completely in entire sections of cities. Maybe it’s off for 4-hours, maybe 8-hours, maybe 12-hours, we never really knew when there would or would not be power: it made working from the road fairly difficult too. Coming from where we are from and going to where we went, one of the more glaring issues we both had an extremely difficult time with was the very in-your-face racism that is alive and well. Mainly in South Africa, but the neighboring countries were not fully immune. Racism exists to the extremities it always has, on both sides of the racial coin. One day while camping next to a few fishing holes in this beautiful nature oasis with gate-only access that had zebra and warthogs strolling through our camp we got talking to a fisherman. He asked how being from Canada we ended up at or heard about this place. I said I saw it listed as a camping spot online and we just showed up. He then explained to us that it was a “Whites Only” reserve of holiday homes that had existed since Apartheid. The man was from the UK originally and explained the full history of the area. I felt appalled, I felt gross. It was such a contrast of beautiful and terrible things in one place. We didn’t last long there. However that is just one of the thousands of examples and neither whites, blacks, nor colored people were able to fully avoid it. Angie read Trever Noah's book Born A Crime to help wrap her head around some of what we were experiencing as outsiders. Overall there were way more likes than dislikes and Angie loved exploring Africa the way we did. She found a new appreciation for beds that don’t move & having showers whenever you want one. If you’ve ever considered going to Africa, go! We’ve only seen a limited part of a very vast continent, however, I feel like the southern countries offer the easiest cultural transitions from the western world or Europe. Over something like East Africa which might be a cultural overload for a lot of people. The longer you go the more you learn and the cheaper it is. This is a universal truth for anywhere in the world, this article just happens to focus on Africa. And, if you are planning to go in a tent, on a budget, and for your honeymoon for six months. You’ll learn extremely quickly if you’re cut out for marriage. 
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