Six recognisable forms, and a good trip uses two or three

Fixed tented camp

Canvas on a permanent platform or frame, six to twelve tents, plumbed, with a proper bed and a shower that works. It stands in the same place season after season and is often taken down entirely in the wet months.

This is the default form of a good safari and for most people the right one. You hear everything at night, which is the point and takes about three nights to become the best part rather than the worrying part.

The operational advantage is size. A camp of eight tents can leave at five because there are sixteen guests and the kitchen knows all of them.

Suits: almost everybody. Ask: how many tents.

Lodge

A built structure in stone, timber or thatch, with rooms rather than tents, typically twenty to forty of them, often with a pool, air conditioning and a spa.

Lodges are warmer, quieter and more solid, and at altitude in Kenya or Rwanda that solidity is a genuine comfort rather than a compromise. They are also more institutional — fixed meal times, buffets at the larger ones, drive departures built around a group.

Suits: families with small children, anyone nervous about canvas, cold highland nights, the first or last night of a trip. Ask: how many rooms, and when do the vehicles leave.

Mobile camp

A camp erected for your arrival and struck after you leave, with a crew moving ahead to the next site. Proper tents, proper beds, and a bathroom that is either bucket-fed or plumbed depending on the outfit.

Private mobile camping is the closest thing to the original meaning of the word, and it is the standard answer for somebody on their sixth lodge-based trip who wants the seventh to be different.

Suits: experienced travellers, groups taking the whole camp, photographers who want to be where nothing else is. The catch: it costs what a small hotel costs, because it is one, staff included.

Fly camp

One or two nights away from a main camp in something very light: a bedroll under a net, a canvas bathroom dug for the night, a fire, and dinner cooked in front of you.

It is not a whole trip and it is not meant to be. Two nights of it inside a fortnight is the cheapest available upgrade to how a trip is remembered.

Suits: anyone wanting one night unlike the rest. The catch: the land must permit it, which rules out national parks.

Private house or villa

A whole house taken exclusively, with its own staff, vehicle, guide and chef. Usually four to twelve beds.

For a family or a group of friends it is frequently both better and cheaper per head than the same people in separate tents, and it removes every negotiation about timing: the vehicle leaves when your party says so, and lunch happens when you are hungry.

Suits: six or more together, multi-generational parties, anyone with small children. The catch: below six the per-head maths stops working.

The genuinely unusual

Photographic hides with beds in them, at eye level with a waterhole. Star beds wheeled out onto a platform. A boat that sleeps you on the water. A converted ranch house on a working property. Research camps that take two guests at a time.

These are one-night ideas rather than trips, and they are the cheapest way to make an experienced traveller’s itinerary feel new. They also book out a long way ahead, because there is usually exactly one of each.

How to combine them

Two or three forms across a trip, not more. A lodge for the arrival night and the altitude, a fixed camp for the heart of it, a fly camp or a private house for the part you will describe afterwards.

Four forms in twelve nights is a trip about accommodation, and each change costs a day of settling in before the place starts working.