How to plan your safaris and when to go to Tanzania 

There are two ways to plan your safari on the Northern Circuit. You can do it ahead of time, finding a company through guidebooks, recommendations, and the internet, or you can just turn up at Arusha and look around there. Each of these techniques has advantages and drawbacks. Planning ahead makes it more likely that you’ll get bookings at the lodges you want (they fill up during high season), but can be scary, since it involves a certain leap of faith in the company’s honesty and competence.

We had a very limited amount of time for our safari, so we decided to make arrangements before arriving in Arusha. We started by deciding what kind of safari we wanted; we made a list of the parks we wanted to visit; and we decided on staying in lodges rather than tents.

We wanted lodges for two reasons: the more comfortable beds and air conditioning. The beds were fine, but in early August, air conditioning turned out to be both unavailable and unnecessary; from that point of view, camping would have been no problem. Otherwise, the decision rests on your budget and your preference in ambience.

The price difference between the two is about $35 per person per day, $125 in lodges versus $90 camping. The lodges are, for the most part, large, luxury, or semi-luxury hotels, with grand buffet meals in cavernous restaurants and fleets of servants to carry your luggage for you.

The campsites are campsites, with very basic plumbing facilities and no fences around them, so that, in principle, lions can wander into your camp at night. If I had it to do over again and all my travelling companions were up for it, I’d go for camping, which is a much more immersive experience.

Whether you go lodges or camping, food is provided. Vegetarian food is no problem in the lodges (there was once nothing on the buffet, but I asked and they brought me a curry, which was better than anything my carnivorous companions had). Kosher food should be OK too, depending on how strict you are; you can go veggie if you want to be on the safe side, but Tanzania’s a Muslim country, and the Muslim dietary restrictions on meat resemble the Jewish ones. (I’m assuming that the locally available meat is all halal. If anyone knows I’m wrong, please tell me!)

Once we’d decided what we wanted, choosing a safari company turned out to be surprisingly easy. We checked some guide books for listings of companies in the low- to mid-range budget, and checked out their web pages. I emailed the companies with descriptions of what we wanted, and sorted them out based on how they responded. Some never answered or the email bounced, and some offered only set itineraries or tours with larger groups; these we threw out. Some were fully booked (we were doing the planning three weeks before the trip). Only one actually responded to everything I’d asked about in my email and offered complete information on pricing and itineraries. So that was the one for us: MICATZ, which you can contact throughhttp://www.micatz.com we found them to be very professional and reliable on safaris programs and volunteering programs; they answered our e-mails promptly and our questions completely.

Whatever you choose, you’ll absolutely have to have a four-wheel vehicle, and a guide is required to enter Ngorongoro and Serengeti National Parks. Prices may be negotiable, but only up to a point, as there’s a large park entry fee (up to $50 per person per day).

So that’s the practical order of how you choose your safari. But the other thing that matters most, the thing that provides you with the questions to ask your safari company, is the choice of itinerary. There are a number of parks in the area of Arusha, each with a different character. In the course of a five-day safari, we went to Tarangire, Serengeti, Ngorongoro Crater, and Lake Manyara; this was a pretty intense travel schedule, as the distances between the parks take a while to cover. Most tour companies will suggest that you do something similar, a sort of tasting menu of the parks, but if you want a more leisurely pace, it’s perfectly possible, and I thought it could be really nice to build in a few longer stopovers, which would allow you to spend one morning looking at the vista in a lodge or several hours watching the same group of animals (lions hunting, for example).

Each park has its own specialty. Tarangire is a plains ecosystem around a permanent river, and is supposed to be good for elephants. The Serengeti is a vast, vast plain teeming with pretty much every kind of wildlife. To get there from Tarangire takes most of the day, as the road passes through Ngorongoro Park, so it’s important to spend two nights in Serengeti if you want to make the trip worthwhile. Ngorongoro Crater is spectacularly beautiful and has one of the densest populations of animals; it’s also the only park in which it’s possible to see rhinoceros (we didn’t, but people do). It’s also the touristiest of the parks; if you’re bothered by seeing other jeeps, make your stay there a shorter one.

Lake Manyara is known for its tree-climbing lions (we didn’t see them there, but we did, surprisingly, in Tarangire) and one of the best bird-watching spots I’ve ever seen. There’s also Arusha National Park, which we did not go to; I’m told that it’s less touristy than most (as proven by the fact that we didn’t go?), which sounds appealing.

By John Schneider