Safari!

In March, we decided to go on safari in Africa.

Where to go?  What to do?  How long to stay?  And then the more practical matters... How much would it cost?  What should we bring?  And on and on... 

Finally, we decided we'd go to Tanzania.  Also, as long as we were traveling all the way to Africa (from the United States) - we decided to make the most of our vacation and also go to Rwanda.  We had a lot of questions, and spent a lot of time looking up answers to those questions.  We researched 48 different travel and tour agencies for just the Tanzania portion of the trip alone.

Since we expected this to be our only trip to Africa for a long time, so there were a lot of things we wanted to balance in our vacation.  We wanted to get in a lot of fun activities to make the most of the trip, but we didn't want to be running around ragged.  We wanted to have the exciting camping safari adventures we'd heard about, but we didn't particularly want to be roughing it.  We wanted to keep costs manageable, though we were willing to do our version of a "splurge" (but couldn't afford the $3000/night lodging splurge someone mentioned to us...our definition of a splurge is...not that high). 

We're sharing some of our tips, including things for which we're patting ourselves on the back - and some of our snafus, to hopefully save other people some travel planning time.

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Comments

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Mon, 04/16/2012 - 01:17

Your website is terrific and is going to help me immensly in planning our trip. Who did you use to book the Rwanda portion of your trip, maybe I missed it but don't see your tour operator listed here. Thank you

Submitted by admin on Wed, 04/25/2012 - 21:18

Sorry for the delay, and thanks so much for your comment!  We booked via Mapendano.  The email address:  mapendanovoyages@aol.com  Everything went smoothly, and the responses to our questions were timely.  We had no complaints/concerns about this tour operator.Still, the things I would consider doing differently:

  • - We didn't do such detailed price comparisons for the Rwanda part of the trip (as the cost was much lower, and we were getting tired...) - so I don't know that this is the best/lowest price.  We simply went with this tour operator, as he was recommended by/friends with our Tanzanian operator.
  • - In hindsight, I would consider someone who seemed more familiar with flights between Tanzania and Rwanda - or who was more helpful.  It seems trivial, but this was our first trip and so we had lots of questions.  
  • - We did all the coordination between Tanzania/Rwanda on our own, and I would have loved to have even more help with that.

Have a wonderful trip!

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Wed, 05/23/2012 - 14:52

Hi - thanks for all the valuable advice on the site! We're considering doing a short excursion to Rwanda this summer when we're in Tanzania for safari, so I'm hoping you can give a bit more information. Did you fly JRO to Kigali on RwandaAir? What was the final cost for the tour you booked? Any other advice? Thanks!

Submitted by admin on Tue, 06/05/2012 - 22:38

Hi there!  We booked via Rwanda Air (but the actual airline was PrecisionAir), flying JRO to Kigali.  For Rwanda, I believe the costs came to about $1K/person (4 nights including board + airport transfer) + $1K for the permits ($500/day).  Plus airfare, of course.I posted the detailed costs on the site, under the section "Choosing a Safari Tour Operator".  Here's the link: http://porcupinelane.com/how-we-chose-our-tour-operator-travel-tips-rwan... ---- but it might get outdated because I plan to play around with this site again (my first site, and the URLs still keep changing on me as I use this site template.. =P)No other comments or advice off the top of my head - it was a lot of fun and really great.   But if you have any more questions, just let me know!  For what it's worth, we were debating adding on the short excursion to Rwanda to see the gorillas before we went.  It was completely worth it, and definitely a highlight of the trip overall.  After deciding we would go, we decided to go for two days (as long as we were traveling all that distance, it seemed to make sense) and really make the most of the side excursion to Rwanda.  Thus, we saw two different gorilla families, which was wonderful.  Have a great time!

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