Hi everyone! I'd love your advice and insight into helping me plan a honeymoon. I'm bullet-pointing the below to make it easy to read! Thanks in advance 🙂

Dates:

End of December 2025 (after Christmas), for 8-14 days

Type of honeymoon desired, and style of travel:

• Beachy, tropical, not super touristy, and are happy to deal with a low-ish amount of tourist infrastructure. As an example, we don't want to go to Zanzibar – too many tourists and sometimes feels a bit contrived.
• On other travels, we normally backpack out of choice and enjoy the rougher, more adventurous travel, and so – although we want our honeymoon to be more laid back and comfortable – we don't want overwhelming amounts of inauthentic tourist infrastructure. We will also likely avoid big hotel "resorts".
• However, being our honeymoon, this is the one holiday that we will aim to just relax and enjoy some comforts.
• Privacy is a big factor for us, so we'd prefer a small, detached cabin somewhere rather than a room in a huge hotel building (however, open to considering everything).
• We would love to be very close to the water – even on the beach if possible! An example would be a little cabin on the water's edge in Lake Malawi (read further down why this is not an option).
• Although tricky to combine with my above preference for seclusion, meals being catered would be a big help. It doesn't have to be super all-inclusive…although once again, open to considering it. If the place is close to restaurants, then it doesn't even need to be catered – we can just eat out.

Other activities:

• We don't need safari. We are from South Africa and so we see the Big 5 a lot.
  • However, we're definitely open to it, but it's lower on our list of priorities and if it costs a lot, we are more likely to skip it in favour of other things (see budget section below)
• Other activities are welcome, aside from awkward, contrived "see Africans in their natural habit" kind of thing. We're keen for snorkelling, boat trips, cooking classes, authentic cultural experiences, hikes, etc.

Location:

We are keen for East Africa somewhere. Lake Malawi ticked a lot of our boxes regarding possibility of a secluded cabin on the water, but apparently December is a really bad month to visit – incredibly humid and lots of storms.

I really dislike high humidity, so – although I can deal with hot sun by using sunscreen (fair-skinned) – I'd like to avoid super high humidity.

Maybe Lake Victoria somewhere? …if the climate is good at that time of year.

The Kenyan coast seems nice; I understand there are two main areas – the coast south of Mombasa, and the coast north of Mombasa.

We are also open to visiting multiple locations, just not too many. Maybe we explore Mombasa for a day or two, or Nairobi.

I just have no idea where to start looking. I also don't know what the going price is for reasonable accommodation in the coastal area. Which leads me to my next point below – budget.

Budget:

We don't have the same spending power as Europeans and North Americans, so we're aiming to avoid the places that specifically cater to those customers (and that charge an arm and a leg).

I really don't even know what a reasonable per-day budget to allocate is – hence looking to get some insights.

All I know is that we'd like to get something as relatively affordable as possible, while still having some imitations of luxury (it's a spectrum, I'm aware).

.

I'd really appreciate any advice, suggestions, insights, or wisdom you may have! The more detailed the better, but I welcome all input.

Thanks friends 🙂