Rare Adventures

Tag: safari

Serengetti Safari Experience: Comfort Over Camping

In the blog about planning a safari I mentioned that Wooksie, a woman who has suffered many holiday traumas in her life, was absolutely adamant that she would not be camping among wild beasts and creatures of the night on the safari.

So in my discussions with Erick of Joining Safaris, I made it abundantly clear that a small tent would not be acceptable, but something with a bed would be fine, as long as it had a door.

After the day chasing elephants in the truck we were heading to our accommodation. We had seen our companions camp site in the morning when we collected the gear, so we assumed we would be staying there in a bungalow or something similar.

When we pulled off the highway onto this dusty road and Rashid (our guide) shouted out that we had arrived, it’s fair to say we were a bit nervous and I got a look from Wooksie that said “I warned you”.

We pulled up to some steel gates, that opened automatically and we drove into the parking area. It was like one of those scenes from a dystopian film where the people on the outside of the walls were living in squalor and the rich people inside the walls were living in luxury.

Looking at the photos I still can’t quite believe how this oasis of greenery could exist in such a barren landscape. There were gardeners tending flowers and mowing the lawn, it was stunning, in fact, jaw dropping.

Even more weirdly we were the only people staying at the complex. I can only imagine that this had been built for the American tourist market and there weren’t many around so we got it cheap.

Even Wooksie was happy and enjoyed the benefits of a warm shower, a comfy bed and protection from the mosquitoes. When we went to dinner, they even sent a chap come around to put mosquito treatment in the room, there were some big flying beasties around so we were grateful.

Dinner was spent celebrating Argyle’s home win over Luton, which turned out to be one of the high points of the season as Wayne Rooney took us to mid table mediocrity, a place we wouldn’t see again all season !

Meanwhile, our travelling companions had indeed been camping in some very nice tents and with some close up encounters with creatures of the night, so we kept a bit quiet about our luxury so we wouldn’t lose street cred.

In fact they meet creatures of many kinds and I’m glad I didn’t have to accompany Wooksie to the loo overnight

10/05/2025
Serengetti safari -The elephants of Tarangire

After some thought, we settled on a 3 day safari in Tanzania, mainly because we just wanted to see the Big 5 animals in the wild rather than hunting around for obscure animals and we get bored easily so we wanted excitement !

Rashid our guide picked us all up nice and early, and we all piled into the Toyota truck where we found our travel companions already installed in the back. We have found that one of the best things about these trips is the people you meet, so we would never consider having a private tour.

Our safari companions

On this occasion we were lucky enough to have some young fun people onboard who could speak perfect English. Yente from the Netherlands was volunteering in a children’s refuge teaching English and having her first adventure abroad on her own.

We also had Noa and Clara who were young German doctors using their work year to volunteer at the local hospital in Moshi to develop their skills. So great company for the trip and fortunately the truck wasn’t too full either.

So we set off early from Moshi on the 5 hour drive to the Tarangire National Park, which is famous for it’s concentration of elephants.

It was a long dusty drive and if you have long legs, try not to chose the seat behind the driver, where your knees hit his seat like mine did. On the way we picked up the camp cook, and somehow an entire kitchen was squeezed into the back of this truck, along with tents, camping gear and all the ruck sacks.

We had various breaks at townships along the way, which were mainly long settlements spread along the road with various little shops and stalls that keep the local population going with supplies. The countryside is just miles of savanna grassland with a few hills, the odd lake and not much else to see!

There was much excitement when we finally arrived at Tarangire as we were finally going to see some animals. The park gate was overwhelmed by trucks, they were scattered everywhere around the car park and packed with enthusiastic patrons and after the normal faffing around wherever there is African bureaucracy.

Mongoose family

Our first animal encounter, rather than elephants, was the exciting the sight of a little family of Mongoose running along the verge and wrestling with each other as they played.

Our first of the Big 5 – the elephants

It wasn’t long before we found our first big herd of elephants as a watering hole. It took time for the truck to find a good slot to watch, this is the value of a good driver as they know where to position the truck and second guess where the animals will head.

Initially they were in the distance and our truck was positioned in the shelter of some trees. Within a few minutes the herd started to make it’s way to our little hiding spot and we had the wonderful experience of being surrounded by these enormous animals who seemed to enjoy a good scratch on the trees.

Being surrounded by the enormous beasts was a spellbinding experience. They are so serene together, the big bull elephant is clearly the lord of the herd and doesn’t look like a fella you want to annoy. The babies follow the mothers around and most of them seemed to enjoy a good scratch on the trees that made their day that much more enjoyable.

Elephant stops play

The journey around the park last about 3 hours and we took up numerous lookouts and watched herds in the distance. There were very few other species on view other than giraffes and zebras.

Another highlight of the day was the close encounter with the baby elephant who popped out of the bush and took a shine to our truck and wanted to play.

It is fair to say we were not alone. With numerous other safari trucks bouncing around the tracks and we had some amazing traffic jams when an animal appeared. Basically the best drivers seem to second guess where they will appear and within minutes all other trucks appear.

After the tour was over it was a 90 minute drive to find our accommodation. Yente, Noa and Clara were camping but Wooksie was absolutely determined she wasn’t camping, so we had booked mid range accommodation.

Everyone in the truck slept soundly on the way to the accommodation after a hot and dusty day.

09/05/2025
My weight loss journey – the power of dreams

Why should you change your lifestyle if there is no personal incentive, you need a dream

A valuable lesson is having a goal that will stretch you, and holding yourself to account for achieving it. Make it something so exciting that you will make sacrifices to achieve it.

Click here to follow the res of My Weight Loss Journey

In January 2018 I was still 16st 8lb, the result of beer and BBQs every night and living in the great outdoors down under. As you can see from the photo, I still had a long way to go.

The NZ trip wasn’t all fun, there had been a work element to it and whilst there we had discussed me returning for a longer work trip later in the year.

Finding the dream

Unconnected but relevant, my eldest lad had been surfing off a boat in Bali the previous year and I couldn’t believe that he had achieved such a dream experience. It then occurred to me that if I was heading to NZ I could stop off in Bali and try surfing off a boat. This was an enormous stretch from where I was at that moment, but I wanted it.

I had a goal and I went public with all my pals – “I am going surfing from one of those boats in Bali this year, just like in the videos”, and that meant getting myself sorted and this time I would lose weight.

The Man v Fat football hadn’t really helped me much at this stage, but it was largely because I’d hardly played in the previous 4 months. I bought the ManVFat book and read up on the weight loss techniques and it was quite clear to me that the only way to deal with my weight was calorie counting. I already has an exercise watch that tracked my activity and calories that I was burning, so I just needed to start counting what was going in.

I downloaded the myfitnesspal app that enabled calories tracking and got started.

I had to deal with a few more things, firstly I had to find time to go to the gym, I hate mornings but manged to coax myself there for 8.30 am and got used to it. I had an emotional issue that I felt I was letting my staff down as I wasn’t the first one in the office every day, so I started to view the time at the gym as work prep time not leisure time.

I then had to deal with my lifestyle when not in the office, working away and travelling. So I developed a “calorie trading” technique, so if I was away and wanted to have a couple of beers watching the football, I would “earn the right” by going for a 1 hour walk to earn the 450 kcals that would be in the beer.

Finally there was my all round fitness, a cortisone injection and physio fixed my shoulder but it also highlighted that my core wasn’t particularly strong from all the sitting around, so I did loads of situps. Not surprisingly I ended up with a knackered back, another 4 week layoff from running but I kept going to the gym doing any exercise I could to burn calories.

I had a dream and I was going to make it and nothing was going to get in my way.

21/04/2025
The Ultimate Guide to Planning Your Tanzanian Safari
Last year we decided that we should try a safari. It hadn’t really been high on my agenda as a family thing in the past but now it is just Wooksie and I, we decided it was next on the list.

My eldest lad had done a safari for his honeymoon, and explained that they sat in a lodge, silently, for hours waiting for the animals to turn up.

Quite frankly this sounded like my idea of hell, being hyper active and a very noisy person that rejoices in lots of noise and action, then this didn’t sound like my bag.

Types of safaris

So a bit of research highlighted 3 types of safaris,
1. Game lodges, these seemed to be mainly private and based around South Africa and the countries in that area.
2. Game drives. Where you belt around the countryside looking for animals in a 4×4, these seemed to be on the Serengeti so tended to be popular in Kenya and Tanzania.
3. Specialist gigs. Seemed to be for people who had done the above and wanted something more specific or rarer animals.
It is more complicated than this as there are variants and combinations of each type but hopefully you get the idea.

Type – So a quick search reveals thousands of tours and options so where the hell do we start. Deciding we wanted to go chasing animals was important and it slimmed the options down to Kenya and Tanzania.

Where – the options were Kenya or Tanzania – the safaris are either north or south of Kilimanjaro and the vast Serengeti which stretches into both countries. (nobody seems to have explained to the wildebeest the charge between them for their annual holidays). We settled on Tanzania because it sounded more exotic and we were able to fly directly into Kilimanjaro airport rather than via a smoggy capital like Nairobi.

Length – there are also loads of different options for length, from 2 days to 21 days. A chat with eldest son helped further, as they said they saw most of the animals in one particular area and their other activities were more of the same, so we focused our search on 3 to 5 days, as after discussions with Wooksie we both agreed we would probably get bored any longer.

Tour company – with one or two minor exceptions we have always planned our holidays independently, which is why we have so many adventures but a safari seemed different and risky and there are hundreds to chose from, so where do we start.

Having worked out roughly what we wanted I contacted the main specialist operators in the UK for a rough price and got wildly different pricing. So I decided I needed to better understand the pricing model and break it down so did more research.

I found this website that was a portal for the local safari companies, that basically put us in direct contact with the safari companies and took out the middle man. It was then quite easy to work out the actual prices we would pay and realised we could save a lot by doing it ourselves.

We contacted half a dozen of the companies offering the 3 day tour, specified that the accommodation needed to be decent, Wooksie insisted she wouldn’t sleep in a tent surrounded by beasts and creepy crawlies.

The companies were based in Tanzania, mostly in Moshi and eventually we settled on Joining Safaris Ltd, Erick was a really helpful guy who gave straight answers to our questions promptly, you can find them at http://www.joiningsafaris.com and I’d definately recommend them.

The second part of the adventure was some down time, if you are in Tanzania Zanzibar is a short flight away so that was simple enough, hotels booked through hotels.com and booking.com plus safari booked with Erick.

Price Breakdown

So when planning, here is the rough price breakdown in 2024 so you can discuss with an agent or book it yourself

Flight from UK to Kilimanjaro return – about £1000 with premium economy one way (KLM)

Safari – £1200 with mid range accommodation each

Flights to Zanzibar, about £200 return

6 nights Hotel on Zanzibar at TUI Zanzibar Bay Resort and Spa about £650 via Booking.com
19/04/2025