My wife and I were looking for a big trip to take, and she suggested to go to southern africa, (south africa, botswana, victoria falls) for a 3 week trip in November. I was pretty hesitant because its africa although cape town (+wine country) and botswana are very safe. I'd have to say it's by far the best trip we have taken, although extremely expensive (~25k in 3 weeks).
If you hate flights, this is not the trip for you. 11 hours from SFO to europe (heathrow for us) then 11 more hours to Cape Town. The way back was 4+ flights, 38 hours door to door. We took 12 flights total. You shouldn't do this trip if you can only take a week or two off.
Cape town was very european and cheap. We stayed in a safe trendy area and ate very well. Even at a trendy restaurant, I'd get a filet, she'd get lamb; bottle of wine, the total would be $40USD. We hired a private tour guide to drive us around the city, the cape, and through wine country where we spent a few days. This was all arranged by a travel agent which is very common for US/euro tourists. We met a lot of people doing similar trips along the way.
We went on safari in Kruger in SA (saw the big 5 animals in the first hour), then to Victoria Falls which was OK (wouldn't recommend TBH, but saw what tourist towns in Zambia and Zimbabwe are like). Though it was nice to split up the safari days since we had ~9 days of safari.
The amazing thing about the private safari camps is they can drive anywhere. We were literally following lions, leopards, cheetahs behind by 20 feet. The guides would drive over massive bushes and even small trees with the truck to make sure we saw everything, including the hunting by the predators.
The camps have more staff than guests - 16 to 24 guests max. We each had our own house in the middle of the bush, no fences or anything. Our last camp In Botswana was on a river filled with hippos. Botswana was very safe/touristy/developed btw.
So moto, here are your requested pix delivered in a new thread.
All taken with a cheap-ish ($1100) 3 year old canon 70d with 55-250mm zoom (cropped so 250mm becomes 375mm), although we were so close in our truck at these private camps, i had to swap to a wider lense a couple times. we had lions cubs walking under our car and mom right on the side. A male lion slept under our house and woke us up one night for several hours while he grunted to other lions.
Other tourists were ranged in cameras - some dorks were taking photos with their iphone. Other groups hired their own guide/tracker/truck and had $40k+ in cameras/lenses. Average was similar to us with the 70D.