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~lustedtowander~
US
Visited:
October 2011
Reviewed: Feb 22, 2012
Email ~lustedtowander~ | 35-50 years of age
Classic game parks, but spoiled by too much industrial tourism.
The very names of the Tanzanian National Parks can fire the imagination! Serengeti... Ngorongoro.... However, while the wildlife viewing is superb, the experience is tainted by industrial tourism, poor facilities and outrageous entrance fees. Many times I have heard foreign visitors say they don't mind the high cost, as it is an investment in conservation. Unfortunately, there is little evidence of tourism dollars being directed towards conservation. That said, if one makes a little effort to avoid the crowds, the safari experience in Tanzania can be excellent.
I love Tanzania. Sometimes (especially in the North) it is a bit touristy, that's why I rated 'bush vibe' good instead of excellent. I'm not into birding.
Book an organised safari in advance!
The Serengeti and Ngorongoro are amazing parks. The best Leopard action I've ever had, and loads of other excellent animal and bird encounters. The campsites
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are pretty good aswell. Prices are very high, as they are elsewhere in East Africa, compared with similar parks in southern Africa.Due to our visa predicament, we didn't have time to see anymore of Tanzania. I'd love to go back though, and go to Zanzibar and the Selous.
Tanzania is a country which has got very beautiful parks with natural animals compared to other African countries though to some places infrastructure is still not good.
Johan Gardelius
SE
Visited:
December 2007
Reviewed: Jan 26, 2012
Email Johan Gardelius | 50-65 years of age
A family trip to Tanzania
We stayed three weeks, and it was the best trip the family has ever done. Apart from the parks, we also saw Zanzibar.
Globalism Pictures
GB
Visited:
December 2005
Reviewed: Jan 23, 2012
35-50 years of age
Tanzania has probably the widest, wildest spaces and the biggest selection of wildlife of them all. The people are very warm, and the sense of somewhere else is unbeatable for a first-timer to Africa.
nilsrinaldi
Visited:
December 2010
Reviewed: Jan 23, 2012
Less industrialed safaris than for instance Kenya, lots of space for animals to wander around.
Jussi Mononen
FI
Visited:
January 2006
Reviewed: Jan 21, 2012
Email Jussi Mononen | 35-50 years of age
Very diverse destinations, improving infrastructure, and generally more affordable than e.g. South Africa or Botswana.
Wild Wild Africa
So much of Tanzania feels untouched. The southern regions that I travelled in were wildest, purest Africa. Jungle,beaches, mountains, wildlife - Tanzania has it all. Hiking to the waterfalls of the Udzungwa Mountains National Park, negotiating the chaos of Dar's traffic, snorkelling the reefs off the coast and game driving in the many wildlife destinations and sharing a Ndhovu Lager with Tanzanian friends in a bar to round it all off. Karibu sana, rafiki.
gem and stu
GB
Visited:
March 2008
Reviewed: Oct 26, 2011
20-35 years of age
Big beasts, big leaves, big spices
Anyway, we still didn’t really know what to expect – so we met with our guide for the three day safari (Beerman) and rode off towards the Serengeti National Park. The drive up took about 5 hours and we first had to go through the Ngorongoro Crater Conservation area (Ngorongoro means “cowbell” in Masai because apparently that is what the word sounds like.) We didn’t go into the crater on the first day, instead we drove around the rim and down into the plains of the Serengeti. First of all we were so excited to see anything we stopped to take pictures of whatever we saw, no matter how
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far away they were. But once we got down onto the vast plain, there were no shortage of things to look at – especially wildebeest, impala and zebra, which are in total abundance.Approaching dusk, we pulled into our campsite for the night – not exactly completely in the bush (there was at least a toilet (long drop, not very pleasant) but there was no fences and nothing to stop the animals coming in…
Beerman and some others from the safari company cooked us dinner and we were a little disconcerted that they slept in the caged off area that served as the kitchen while we were out in the open!! We managed not to get eaten alive although everyone (apart from me) heard a pride of Lion killing a buffalo scarily close to our campsite.
And that was just day one!!!Day two in the Serengeti started (after swapping stories of hearing lion in the night – some other group got a little over-excited and claimed that the lion were walking in between our tents!!!) with an early morning game drive – we left about 6.30 so any notion of this being a relaxing holiday soon got abandoned.
It wasn’t looking like being a terribly successful morning – we saw a herd of elephant in the distance, a water buck and some interesting birds (as well as the ever present impala and a few buffalo).
Then possibly the highlight of our tour thus far; going back through the main plains of the serengeti we spotted a cheetah in the distance. There were three about two hundred metres to our left and we watched them walking for about 10 minutes. Then, when we thought they were just going to wander off, they suddenly changed direction and headed towards the road. It turns out that they had spotted an Impala standing on a termite mound 300 metres to the right of our road. We watched them, a mother and two young, cross the road right in front of us and then slowly approach and stalk the impala right up until the final chase. The kill happened just over the brow of the hill so we did not see that (and neither impala or cheetah were seen again so we new they had made the kill) but that didn’t stop it being an amazing site!!!
That night we camped on the crater rim, which was alot colder than we had been used to. Also the campsite (another bush camp) was also occupied by an old (and grumpy) buffalo who grazed the site during the night and chased anybody who dared to go to the loo.
Surviving the night on the Crater rim with the not-so-friendly buffalo, day three of our Serengeti excursion started early again (6am) and straight after breakfast we descended through the mist into the crater itself, a massive caldera. David Attenborough could possibly tell you why but there is but there is an unbelievably amount of animals in the one location. Unlike the plains of the Serengeti, these animals do not migrate so there is always alot to see. The first thing we say as soon as we reached the bottom was this massive bull elephant. We had a distant view of a black Rhine, saw some Zebra giving themselves a sandbath and then spotted the aftermath of a lion kill. The Hyena were fighting over the carcass.