Tanzania & Zanzibar Diary

Tanzania has to be our second favourite safari destination in Africa – after Zambia.

The game viewing is almost as spectacular as in Zambia, with a wide variety of very different National Parks and Reserves to visit.

Added to this is the opportunity to finish off your trip by unwinding on an idyllic Indian Ocean beach on the neighbouring island of Zanzibar.


(map courtesy of Lonely Planet)

As can be seen from the above map, Tanzania has a large number of visitor destinations, spread out over a wide area. However many of these, besides only perhaps having one or two camps, are somewhat remote, and hence expensive to reach.

Perhaps the best-known destinations are the mighty Serengeti National Park and Ngorongoro Crater in the north of the country, but for this trip we chose to ignore these, overrun by tourists as they tend to be, and to focus instead of the much less well known destinations of the Ruaha National Park and Selous Reserve. These locations are much more readily reached from Dar es Salaam, and offer at least as good game viewing as the better-known areas, but with far fewer other visitors to get in your way and spoil your enjoyment of what should be the solitude of the bush.

Add to this the unique combination of a game viewing destination and beach holiday provided by our starting point of Saadani (near Bagamoyo, above), and of course the truly idyllic Indian Ocean beach destination of Zanzibar, and we feel that we had achieved the very best Tanzanian experience open to us.

As before, almost all of the photographs accompanying this report relate directly to the trip taken, and the points at which the pictures reproduced on the right hand side relate back to the text are indicated in the text by the symbol (camera icon).

Again, though, it is worth noting that on this trip many more photographs were taken than on the earlier Zambia trips. In particular Tanzania appears to be rife with extraordinarily photogenic lions, with 100s of unforgettable shots being taken, many of which are reproduced here. We sincerely apologise to those of you who become somewhat bored with all this (camera icon).

Your trip begins here with Day One (although you can also link to specific days directly from the Itinerary Summary that follows).