Nine hours and fifty five minutes. That is a Cape Town day in June.

Why one table can hold a whole year

None of the six places shifts its clocks. South Africa, Mauritius, Tanzania and the United Arab Emirates each keep one time the whole year, so a sunset printed here in June is the same sunset in December apart from the sun's own movement. There is no summer time to add an hour for and no date on which the arithmetic changes.

The clock in the table comes from the tz database, read month by month, and the generator refuses to print if any of the four zones moves between January and July. The sun times come from the NOAA solar equations at the standard altitude of 90.833 degrees, which folds in 34 minutes of arc of refraction and the sun's own half degree of radius, the same convention every published table uses. The figures are for the 15th of the month and for sea level at one named point per destination. Early and late in a month you will see a few minutes either side of these numbers, and a mountain will move a sunrise more than a city street does.

The six trips, month by month

Read the daylight column as the working day: the hours between sunrise and sunset, at the point named in each caption. The clock is local time, the same clock as your phone, all year.

The shortest day, the longest day, and what the gap costs

The swing is the number worth carrying into a decision. A place near the equator gives you almost the same day all year, so the month you pick changes the rain and not the light. A place at 34 degrees south does the opposite.

Cape Town and the Garden Route swing 4h 29m and 4h 30m between June and December, and that is a different holiday in each direction. Zanzibar swings 0h 42m, so a Zanzibar week has twelve hours of day whenever you go, and the decision there is the rain, which is covered on when to go. Mauritius sits in between at 2h 25m, which is why a Mauritius winter week still ends at 17:38 on the beach and a Mauritius summer evening runs to 18:45.

Dubai is the one place on the site where the longest day is the one to think about: 13h 42m in June, against 10h 35m in December. The light is not the problem there. The heat is, and the usable hours in a Dubai June are the ones before nine in the morning and after six in the evening, whatever the table says.

What the light changes in the plan

In the bush the day is the schedule. A Kruger day in June runs 06:36 to 17:12, so the afternoon drive is the short one and the morning drive starts in the dark, which is why every lodge runs both and why the blankets are out at dawn. In December the same camp has until 18:39, and the last hour of a December drive is the best light of the trip.

On the Garden Route a June day ends at 17:25 at Knysna. That is the argument for planning the driving before four in the afternoon and being at the stop for the night before the light goes: the passes are quiet, the animals move at dusk, and a self-drive holiday should not be a race against a sunset you did not look up.

In Cape Town a winter day is nine and a half hours and a summer day is over fourteen, which is why the same five nights feel generous in December and tight in July. The winelands day trip that fits comfortably in summer needs a decision in winter: leave at eight, take one estate less, and be back before the light goes.

If the light is the thing you care about most, the answer is simple and it is on the table: Dubai in June for the longest day, Zanzibar for a steady twelve hours all year, Cape Town and the Garden Route for an early sunset and a long evening, and Mauritius for a day that barely moves. Read this with how long to go for the nights, getting there for the journey that eats the first day, and the long weekends for the dates that fit the school calendar.

What this page does not tell you

It computes light, not weather. Cloud, rain, wind and heat are not in it, and a cloudy Cape Town June day can be darker at noon than the table suggests. The month by month weather is on when to go, and the honest planning answer uses both pages: pick the month for the weather, then use this page to see what the day will look like once you are there.

The figures are also one point per destination. Skukuza is not the whole Kruger, and the Winelands sits a little west of the city centre, so a lodge or a farm an hour away will differ by minutes rather than by hours. Nothing here is a forecast and nothing here is a quote.

How the numbers are checked

scripts/daylight-numbers.py derives every row from the coordinates and the tz database, and rewrites the two derived regions of this page. It refuses to print if a zone moves its clocks, if a sunrise, sunset or day length falls outside a band that would catch an arithmetic error, or if the six destinations it holds do not match the six the site prices.

scripts/daylight-crosscheck.py then puts twelve of these rows against an independent published calculator, sunrise-sunset.org, and requires sunrise and sunset to agree within two minutes. Twelve of twelve agree within 23 seconds. The live deploy check, scripts/verify-daylight-deploy.py, re-derives the rows from the served page and compares the bytes the domain returns with the worktree and the commit at HEAD before the deploy is called good.