Travel Planning
A First-Time Traveler's Guide to Visiting Africa
The planning method applied to one concrete trip — twelve days in Ghana, and every decision that shaped it. An illustration, not a recommendation.
- Category Travel Planning
- Reviewed 28 July 2026
- Sources 1
- Length 2 min read
Our guide to a first trip to Africa sets out how to decide. Advice in the abstract is easy to agree with and hard to use, so here is the same method applied to one trip, with the reasoning left in.
This is an illustration, not a recommendation. It is not an itinerary anyone has run and not one we are selling. Your answers should differ from these; the point is the shape of the working.
The brief
Two travellers, first long-haul trip together, twelve days available in January, moderate budget, and a specific reason for going: one of them has family history connected to the Gold Coast and wants to see it.
That last sentence decides almost everything that follows.
Decision one: one country
Twelve days is two travel days at the ends and ten on the ground. Adding a second country costs two more and gains a stamp. With a specific reason for going, spreading the trip thin works directly against it.
Ghana alone.
The reason for going decides the itinerary. Everything after that is arithmetic.
Decision two: the shape of the ten days
Four locations in ten nights is at the upper limit. It works because the moves are short and two of them are three-night stops.
- Three nights Accra — arrival, recovery, the city itself, Independence Square and the memorial park
- Three nights on the coast for Cape Coast and Elmina, one castle per day and afternoons free
- Three nights Kumasi for the Asante material, which is why this is not only a coastal trip
- One night back in Accra before flying, because a same-day transfer to a long-haul flight is a bad bet
Decision three: what got cut
The northern regions and Mole National Park — a full day each way, and wildlife is not the reason for this trip. Cape Three Points. Volta. All of them good; none of them what these two travellers came for.
Cutting well is most of planning well.
Decision four: the parts that are not sightseeing
Empty afternoons after both castle days, deliberately. A guide booked in advance for the coast rather than arranged at the gate. A local SIM on arrival. Cash drawn in Accra rather than assumed available later.
And documents started the day the flights were booked, not the month before departure — which is the one decision on this list that cannot be recovered if you get it wrong.
Where your version differs
If the reason for going were wildlife, this itinerary is wrong in every particular. If you had eighteen days, the north becomes possible. If you were travelling alone, the guiding and the accommodation both change.
The method survives all of those. The itinerary does not, and is not meant to.