Simbaland Magic Tours

Terrible car, trip hugely impacted

My 5 day safari with Simbaland Tours was mostly amazing - our guide was exceptional and showed us all of the animals we wanted to see in a limited time, including seeing the great migration in the very front row by the river.

However, the car that we were provided was visibly older and in worse condition compared to the other cars from other operators. The car had no front mirror (it fell off), there were cracks on both left and right side mirrors, and a long crack in the front window. No air conditioning, which meant we were breathing so much dirt dust when we had the safari roof closed.

Second day morning, the right side foot rest of the jeep started falling off from our ride from Tarangire to Serengeti. We had to stop twice on the way - once to try to keep it attached to the car (by tying it with a rope), and a second time to take it off and hang it on the roof of the car. This foot rest was hanging on the roof of the car from 2nd day lunch to 3rd day lunch during the game drives.

On the 3rd day lunch, we had to stop outside in a town of the Serengeti gate for 1 hour 45 minutes to fix the car - to put back the right side foot rest in its original position. We spent 20 minutes eating lunch while waiting, and rest of the time we were standing behind a tree in the heat.

Then, right after we passed Northern Serengeti gate, we had a flat tire. It took 1 hour to fix the tire. We could not do a game drive at Northern Serengeti this day, because we spent almost 3 hours fixing the car.

On the 4th day, stopped at a town to spend another 30 minutes fixing the tire.

On the 5th day morning, the foot rest that we fixed on day 3 was falling off again. We spent 30 minutes taking it off and hanging it back up. Because of this, we couldn’t fully close the roof all day.

Then, on the way out of Ngorongoro, we had a car accident as the driver was turning a curve and were stuck in the sand. We had to have another jeep pull our car out. Afterwards, we stopped again for 30 minutes to fix the tire again, which is when we started to worry about missing our flight back to Canada. As a result, we had to drive on the opposite side of the road very dangerously & fast for 3.5 hours before getting to Kilimanjaro International Airport extremely late.

All in all we stopped 8 times because of issues with the car, lost 5+ hours that could’ve been used to do game drives or spend time at the lodges. The car used to operate the safari by the company hindered our experience and we felt that we had to sacrifice a lot of our travel time here because of all the problems that the car had, that could’ve been avoided had the car been in a better condition and properly checked prior.

Unfortunately the car diminished the value of our trip. Having flown 30 hours for this once in a lifetime experience, it hurt to wait outside in the sun during the repair shop stops or wait in the car with no air conditioning in 30 degrees weather... I wanted to leave a honest review as I think it is important for anyone considering which safari operator to choose to have more visibility - as I don’t think anyone deserves the experience I had on their safari.