Travel Review: Africa Mother-Daughter Safari, Tarangire National Park, Ngorongoro Crater, Serengeti National Park

I would have made sure in advance each place I stayed was a little nicer.........as I said I don't think Africa is a good bang for the buck.

Travel Company's Comments

Our client wanted an authentic cultural experience. A visit to the very authentic Hadzabe and Datoga take place in an area of Lake Eyasi that is roughly 5 hours round-trip from Karatu, the nearest town that offers a range of accommodation.

The option is to stay in Karatu and lose almost half of your day commuting to a village or to stay at Kisima Ngeda, which is within a stone’s throw of the Hadzabe and Datoga communities. By spending a night at Kisima Ngeda you are more than doubling the time you have available to visit the Hadzabe and you can join them in the early morning and later part of the afternoon which is cooler and when they therefore conduct a lot of their activities such as hunting and gathering berries. By electing to return to Karatu the same day, you essentially only have the hottest part of the day in which to visit the tribes. Kisima Ngeda is a simple lodge free of any frills and certainly not in the same class as the 4 or 5 star lodges in the town of Karatu which has the infrastructure to support a luxury property. Past clients, however, have been very complimentary about Kisima Ngeda and the reviews posted on Trip Advisor are consistently overwhelmingly positive.

We sympathize as we don’t like creepy crawlies of any sort ourselves but being that one is really in the wild areas of Africa, it is not uncommon to find that one has snuck in with the cleaning staff. We advise those of our guests who are nervous of insects to ask the staff member who escorts them to their tent in the evenings to do a quick check of the tent before we enter for the evening. This way if there is a visiting scorpion, it can be relocated. Fortunately we seldom come across scorpions too often.  As for locking things up, all of the properties had either a safe or trunk with keys.  

We fully agree that Tanzania is indeed an expensive safari destination and it is one of the first facts we share with our clients. While our client had indicated her interest in splitting a 10-day trip between the Serengeti National Park and Zanzibar, our communications quickly led us to conclude that Tanzania was not the right destination for her. We urged her to consider South Africa where the exchange rate lends itself to tremendous “bang for the buck” and the safari lodges offer a luxurious quality of experience that would mesh perfectly with the type of experience she and her daughter were looking for.

In addition to discussing the details of why we felt Tanzania was not the right destination choice for our client, we discussed why we felt the lodge based style of safari experience in the Kruger National Park area was a far better fit for both her and her daughter. There would definitely not have been any sore knees.

Again it depends on where you choose to go. Presently, South Africa offers fantastic “bang for buck” with quality and value that is hard to beat courtesy the exchange rate. In keeping with our client’s interest to visit Tarangire National Park, the Ngorongoro Crater, Serengeti National Park and Zanzibar, we designed a dynamic 10 night itinerary that incorporated all of these areas, included primarily 5 star properties and that was still within the specified budget. The client however elected to downgrade all but one of the accommodation recommendations. Contrary to our recommendation, she also decided to eliminate the Zanzibar component of the trip and replace it with additional safari days. Four days on safari can be easily be quadruple the cost of 4 days at a beach resort. Accordingly the client elected to downgrade even further to remain at the same budget yet also incorporate another 4 safari days to her trip.