Tanzania - Safari out of Arusha

Once we had decided to go to Tanzania we needed to find a good way of seeing as many animals and places as we could in a fairly short space of time. We normally travel everywhere using local transport, which can be very slow. This was to be a totally different trip - we would fly to all the major stops and book a tour to see game animals in Tanzania - it would be extremely difficult and time-consuming to do it any other way. There are almost no shops or other services inside the parks so if you were to go without a tour you would have to be self-sufficient for most of the time that you were there.

We used safaribookings.com to find a company that offered us what we wanted - a private seven-day safari to the major national parks and places around Arusha. We wanted someone who would offer us a mixture of camping and lodges, and who would include at least one walking opportunity. In the end we went with Enjoyable Nature who were very easy to arrange our safari with and who offered what we wanted for a reasonable price. We got the impression that most of the other companies organised their safaris in a very similar way, just varying a bit in where they went and the trip duration.

We flew to Johannesburg from Perth, arriving at 5am, then on to Dar es Salaam later that day. Unfortunately it was much later than we had planned - the flight was delayed, and when we did get to Dar es Salaam the business of getting a visa on arrival took an interminably long time. We finally got to our hotel around 11pm and had to get a taxi back to the airport at 4am the next morning for our flight to Arusha. Not a good start! We had a day in Arusha to recover, and at 8am the next morning we started our tour.

spotted hyena

Enjoyable Nature provided a pop-top Land Cruiser with an excellent driver/guide and a chef. Elius, the guide. was very good at positioning the vehicle so that we had great sightings of all the animals along the way. He was also extremely good at seeing animals that we would never spot. We ate very well - picnic lunches and very good dinners.

We went first to Tarangire National Park, then to Serengeti, Ngorongoro and Lake Manyara before heading out to Materuni waterfall, which was incredibly muddy - so much so that Kaye didn't make it to the falls - finishing with a demonstration of coffee production from raw beans to tasting at the locat village co-operative. Our accommodation was a mix - three nights in lodges or hotels and three nights camping in tents provided by the tour company. It was really cold camping in Serengeti and particularly on the crater rim at Ngorongoro, but camping has its compensations; there are no fences around the campsites, which allowed a large herd of elephants to visit in Serengeti National Park. The campsites also have their resident animals - a family of mongooses raiding the bins and rubbish area, birds in and out of the dining area, and a very socialised maribou stork strutting around the place. There was also the pleasure of laying in the cold dark, wrapped in a sleeping bag, and listening to a lion roar nearby at 4:30 in the morning.

We would generally recommend this sort of trip for anyone wanting to see animals in Tanzania - we saw lots of all the large animals but also many different birds, and enjoyed the countryside in the national parks. There is a down side - all the tour operators are linked by radio so your vehicle is one of dozens that are crowded around any major drawcard - a pride of lions, a leopard or a cheetah, for example. However this only slightly mars the sheer pleasure of being out in the bush seeing the animals. We decided to do what the animals mostly do - ignore the vehicles and people and just enjoy what we were seeing.

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