So how much time in Africa? Just SA or elsewhere? Reason for asking is that if you're planning on wildlife viewing the height of summer is not the best time in many areas - it's the rainy season, foliage too tall to see critters, and water is too plentiful to make rivers/waterholes the big draw.

I've been fooling with an RTW that would go NA-SWP-Africa and have concluded that the best time (for us) that's compatible with Kruger-area visits in SA is May/June, which is not the best time, obviously, to see our first priority in the SWP, South Island in NZ. So we're now looking at changing our plan to skip SWP this time altogether, and make it NA-Asia-Africa-Europe instead. (We're starting in Europe in January then using the North American sectors over the winter/spring.) Hopefully we will be able to finance a back-to-back RTW that will then allow us to do South America and the SWP at a better time of year, which for us would likely be Feb-April the following year.

Maybe this is OT and I should put it in a new thread, but I'll ask anyway. We will be doing DONE4s, and I'm trying to decide on transpacific itinerary. Current choices are (USA)-NRT (AA) or (USA)-HKG (CX). We want to go to Japan on this trip, and we'll have enough segments to "backtrack" from HKG to NRT (or NGO or KIX) if we want, but on the other hand we could probably use those segments elsewhere too. We'll be going HKG-JNB on CX as it is, so we'll see what the CX 744 J product is like; we'll previously have gone YVR-JFK on CX (744 or 343) too. I'm under the impression that CX is preferred by many, but I don't think I've seen it weighed against the AA experience in business. Thanks for any guidance and apologies for the diversion from ijgordon's question.