Tanzania African Safari 2026

Waking up at Zanzibar Coffee House hotel, I ironically don’t have any access to coffee until 7:30 a.m. I give sleeping in my best shot. At 5:20 a.m., I hear a low hum drifting through my window. It was the call to prayer. Somewhere in my sleepy, half-awake state, I remembered that Zanzibar is 98% Muslim. Thanks to Billy Joel, I’ve been familiar with Zanzibar for most of my life.   But he is singing about a bar – with an exotic name.   In 2017, when I planned this itinerary, the beautiful island of Zanzibar, with its turquoise water, was exactly the exotic destination I was dreaming of.   I was surprised to notice that Zanzibar has a more sophisticated feel than the Arusha area. Considering its history, it makes sense – it’s had centuries of international influence. For generations it has been a trading port connected to the wider world. Traders and settlers from Oman, Persia (Iran), India, Portugal, and Britain all left their mark here. Today, those influences ar...

Today is a public holiday. And there is supposed to be a nationwide protest.  However, Fabian - our guide for the day - tells us that people are staying home due to lingering fear from the deadly October 2025 election crackdown. The country erupted in demonstrations after the president's re-election. Reports of up to 1,000 citizens were killed in the harsh crackdown. The US has the travel advisory for Tanzania set at Level 3 exactly for this reason. Although I’m enrolled in STEP (U.S. Department of State Smart Traveler Enrollment Program), the U. S. Embassy in Dar es Salaam gives us no warning about the planned protest. Not a peep. I guess that’s all part of the advisory’s “you’re on your own” bit. However, we are safe, due to a stroke of luck during my planning process. Today we are spending our day three hours away from Arusha in a small, quiet village - far away from any protesting. Materuni Village and Materuni Waterfall are on the lower slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro....

Today we leave Lala Salama camp for the last time - with the roof closed and our seatbelts on. We are making our way to the Ngorongoro Crater on our way back to Arusha. Somehow the road feels even bumpier than it did on our way in. We feel every minute of the three-hour drive to Ngorongoro Crater. We pass a truck that says “highly flammable gas inside”. You couldn’t pay me enough to drive one of those vehicles on these roads. It should say “can explode without warning at any time.” The Ngorongoro Crater, named after the sound a cowbell makes, is surprisingly small compared to the Serengeti. The crater floor covers only about 100 square miles, yet it holds an incredible concentration of wildlife. It is a conservation area, not a national park, which basically means people (the Maasai) live within the larger protected area. They coexist with the wild animals. Today is our opportunity to check off our last animal of the Big 5: the rhino. Among safari destinations, Ngorongoro is co...

In the middle of the night, I’m suddenly awake and aware of my surroundings. First I hear the lion call outside our tent. I can hear it walking along our deck. I’m hardly five feet from it, with a thin layer of canvas separating us. Then a tiger came through the tent. But Greg saved me. Wait a minute. There aren’t any tigers in Africa. I was dreaming. The lion part was real - the guard confirmed we had two walking by our tent, who then spent the night in our camp. The Serengeti brings me back to February 2004 when I took Jeremy to see The Lion King on Broadway. I vividly remember the goosebumps I got watching the opening number: Circle of Life . It was so powerful. But being here now, it feels literal. The grass, the herds, the predators somewhere nearby—it’s all connected in a way that’s hard to fully see at first, but you start to feel it. Nothing is wasted. Not the chase. Not the kill. Not even what’s left behind. It all feeds the next step. Over the next twelve hou...

Waking up after our first night sleeping in a tent in the Serengeti, Greg asked me what animal sounds I heard last night. I didn’t hear anything - I was too busy trying to sleep - and not thinking about what could kill me. “Maybe a lion, definitely a zebra,” he answered his question. It was surprisingly easy to wake up at 3:15am today. For as long as I’ve thought about hot air balloons, my dream has always been to do it in Africa. And we were very excited to be going on a balloon ride! We had a 4:20am pickup time. The balloon company touted the long 1 hour 20 minute drive to the launch site in the pitch dark as a game drive. But the top wasn’t open and they told us to use seatbelts. The driver sped along, focused on staying on schedule. He kept apologizing for the bumpiness, as if we miraculously had gotten to our camp the day before without driving the same ridiculously bumpy roads. I was trying to figure out how our driver knew his way out here without streetlights, stree...