Africa

We always struggle with hiring a small company for private safaris in Africa because you simply never know what you may be getting yourself into even with a robust review of their website, customer reviews, and more.

Generally speaking, we have almost always found our private tour companies via word of mouth- either from friends or other travel bloggers who have had a positive experience with a particular company.

This is how we stumbled upon Tanzania Journeys for our luxury safari in the country (via our friends Green Global Travel), and after speaking with them about their tour options, we knew we were in the best hands for our tour and booked right away.

To put it bluntly, this may have been the most luxurious safari we've been on (most expensive too), and we'd do it again in a heartbeat given the chance.

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Normally when we visit islands, particularly islands known for their beaches, figuring out where to stay is rather easy. We often find a property we like and can afford on the best beach and go from there.

But Zanzibar is a little bit different. On the beach side, there is no standout winner of “best beach” to us if only because every beach we visited was stunning. Likewise, you'll be enjoying the island for far more than the beaches with options like exploring the spice farms and historical Stone Town to name a few. As this island is small enough to be explored in day trips but large enough that those trips will take the bulk of an entire day, figuring out a prime location takes on a few more layers than you would otherwise think.

In another post, we discussed how many days in Zanzibar are really needed (and whether to visit the island before or after a safari). So in this one, we wanted to take a different look and discuss the top locations for visitors outright.

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When we decided to go on safari in Tanzania, we realized we would be visiting during prime river crossing times during the Great Migration (with best times to view the migration typically being mid-July to early-September).

While the mass wildebeest migration is an on-going event year round as the herds follow the rains in a never-ending loop (primarily throughout Tanzania), the Mara River crossing event occurs at a limited window when the herds head north to Kenya during the dry season and then return a few months later when the rains move south.

This event is exciting for visitors (particularly photographers) as river crossings are incredibly dangerous and chaotic. The water is rushing, rocks underneath the surface can cause the animals to break limbs, and the large volume of crossing wildebeests (think thousands if not tens of thousands at a time) make for targets for predators including crocodiles, lions, and more. If there is any experience that illustrates the raw beauty of Africa of life and death, it would be a river crossing- and we really wanted to see one.

As we successfully witnessed a river crossing migration event during our trip to the northern Serengeti, we thought we'd share a bit more about what you can expect!

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When we planned our safari in Tanzania, we saw that Turkish Airlines flew into/out of both Kilimanjaro International Airport and Zanzibar International Airport. As we were flying on the airline due to winning tickets at a conference, and that domestic flights on Tanzanian carriers were rather cheap, we knew we had to spend some time in Zanzibar during our trip.

But, much like we struggled with how much time to go on safari in Tanzania, we had the same question for Zanzibar. But not only did we struggle with how many days you need in Zanzibar, we also had another challenging question to answer too- do you visit Zanzibar before or after safari?

So in this one, we thought we'd share more about our thought process and how we settled on five days in Zanzibar before going on our safari.

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