A Frican safari….. lessons learned
There are plenty of videos, blogs, books, etc. out there that you can go through before heading out on a similar trip that we went on, and we did. Once the rubber hit the road the challenges came at us, we found that we were well prepared for most, too prepared for some, and we still were surprised by a handful of things. Here’s our list:
Probably the most important thing we learned was the need to make sure we were on the same page as our guide/driver. In the time we had, there was no way we were going to see every single inch of every location, so decisions needed to be made and if expectations aren’t shared, disappointment can abound. Our first guide was amazing, but there were only so many places to go in Rwanda, so we got a little spoiled just being led around. Once we made it to Maasai Mara, we started having issues where we’d want to take a picture of something but our driver wouldn’t stop when we asked. By the end of our time with him, we realized that he didn’t know we could get pretty good shots with our camera at over 300 yards and that we had a list of animals that were important to us. This would lead to him dismissing our requests to stop for things like warthogs, mongooses, or birds because he thought they were very common and we’d see them with no issues later. This also led to us missing out on great shots in favor of our driving getting us closer shots. We didn’t always need to take a picture right up the nose of a lion when we could have gotten a sweeping view of the lion crossing in front of an acacia tree with a river in the background.
We had several occurrences where the schedule called for lunch on the road. The first couple of times this took the form of a box lunch and both times it ended up being grilled chicken that our driver left in the box on the seat next to him for 8 hours before we stopped to eat. He had no problem with this and his body has likely adapted to the bacteria that will have grown on the food, but this would have made us sick and cost us at least a day out. The last thing we wanted was to be stuck in the room or have stomach issues with no bathrooms nearby. We made this known to our third guide who was able to regularly get meals packed in camp pots and sealed to slow the cooling of the food. We had beef jerky on us and that helped hold us over those first couple of days with no lunch.
The end of May and beginning of June seems to be a sweet spot. The prices are a little lower because it’s still the edge of the wet season and the big migrations across the river don’t happen during this time, but there are still very large herds moving. This is also before vacation season for a lot of countries. During this time of the year the temperatures are cooler, the flies aren’t as bad, the prices are lower, and we didn’t feel crowded until the very end. This was also helpful for gorilla trekking because the gorillas are found and lower elevations because the babies can’t survive when it’s cold further up the mountain.
Drinkable water is usually plentiful but there were still times where it felt like we were running low. We couldn’t brush our teeth with the tap water and we didn’t drink as much while out on the road, so the two to three bottles we’d have in our room sometimes weren’t enough. We made sure to refill our own bottles from the truck at the end of the day, and we used our GRAYL GeoPress water filter with no problems. We had bought this for Egypt a couple of years ago but were skittish on drinking from it, only using it for brushing our teeth. This time we used it for drinking water with no problems.
I had read a lot about seeing animals at night, whether it was evening game drives, animals right outside of our tent, or early morning encounters but none of those materialized for us. The parks all close at 6:30 pm, most of the encampments have guards to keep animals out, and we were never up early enough for pre-sunrise animal sightings so the headlamps and night vision binoculars we brought were a waste.
Speaking of binoculars, a lot of the literature we were given said that our guide would have a set, but often times he was needing to use them to spot animals. Miranda was glad we brought ours and pretty bummed when they stopped working. I was able to force a couple of parts back together in an unnatural way to get the focus working again, but that told us exactly how valuable they were to have.