I Spent My Honeymoon Travelling Across Southern Africa – Here's My Exact Itinerary

I always knew I wanted my honeymoon to be an adventure. It had to be the type of immersive trip you only make once in a lifetime, a bit like getting married (well, hopefully). My husband and I didn’t want to spend the best part of two weeks doing nothing, even though this is what a majority of couples prefer after the years-long chaos of planning a wedding while still trying to function as a somewhat competent adult. But we wanted to make memories, and plenty of them. The ‘doing nothing’ could wait until we were back home.

We quickly settled on a combination of a safari and beach holiday, which predominantly take place across Africa and the Indian Ocean. As a freelance travel writer, I’d heard Botswana mentioned as the ultimate safari destination frequently over the years. Many tourists often overlook the remote, sparsely populated country for its southerly neighbour, South Africa. But in Botswana, you’re rewarded with secluded, uncrowded wilderness – in fact, on many of our game drives, it was just the two of us (more on this later). In the Okavango Delta, the largest inland delta in the world, the water attracts a dazzling variety of wildlife, from herds of elephants cooling off in the mud to leopards, lions and wild dogs stalking prey in the tall grass. Suffice to say, Botswana was a must.

For the ‘beach’ part of the itinerary, the most popular destinations to visit after Botswana are Mauritius, Mozambique and the Seychelles. My husband and I got engaged in Mauritius in April 2024, and as much as we loved it, we wanted to experience somewhere new. I’d been to the Seychelles years before on a work assignment, so we quickly settled on Mozambique. We also decided to add a few days in Zimbabwe, after realising the Delta’s proximity to Victoria Falls. When else were we going to be this close to the largest waterfall in the world?

But packing this all in to two weeks required a lot of planning. So, after seeking advice from Yellow Zebra Safaris, one of the leading African tour operators, we pulled together the below itinerary. If you’re thinking of doing a similar trip, bookmark this page and use the below as a guide. You won’t regret it – it really was the trip of a lifetime I hoped it would be.

Botswana

Day 1-3: Jao Concession

We began by flying from London to Johannesburg O.R. Tambo, before boarding our connecting flight to Maun, Botswana. Here, we were collected by a representative from Wilderness, a leading conservation and hospitality company with over 60 camps and lodges across eight African countries. After a 40-minute flight on their private charter airline, Wilderness Air, we arrived at our camp in the Jao Reserve, deep within the Delta’s Hunda Island.

With just three tents, this is probably the most intimate safari experience in the Delta. In fact, we were the only guests staying here, so each game drive was completely private, which was a real luxury. All tents have en suite bathrooms with private decks and outdoor showers overlooking the floodplains, while the meandering, wooden platforms make you feel as though you’re camping in a treehouse. The main dining area is shaded by a tree canopy, there’s a bar for sundowners offering panoramic views of the plains, and a swimming pool deck for cooling off and relaxing between drives.