Do I want a private vehicle and guide?
Your guide, and the amount of time he can devote to you and your interests will have a major impact on the quality of your safari. It's no exaggeration to say that your guide can make or break your trip.
So should you have a private guide? The answer is that in an ideal world, you should, and while in some places this is either impractical or too expensive, there are one or two places, most particularly the parks of Northern Tanzania, where this is both affordable and essential.
The northern Tanzania parks - Serengeti, Ngorongoro, Lake Manyara and Tarangire are close enough to each other and Arusha (the starting point of most safaris) that travelling by private vehicle with a private guide makes good sense.
In other parts of Africa, there are many small camps where it is quite a substantial additional cost to hire a private vehicle and guide. In many of the places we recommend to you, camps like Rekero Tented Camp in Kenya, Sausage Tree in Zambia's Lower Zambezi, or Chada Camp in Katavi, we would depend on the good sense of the camps themselves not to mix people with others with widely different interests, so a private vehicle may be unnecessary unless you have a very unusual interest.
Travelling in a group on a scheduled trip is of course one way of reducing costs on safari, but you do need to be aware there is an implicit gamble; you may not share the interests of the other people on your safari, and you will inevitably have to compromise on something we think is of major importance - flexibility.
More articles that you might find helpful
Serengeti - what about the low Season?
How the Serengeti works
How Lions Hunt
Tanzania visa requirements
Northern Tanzania - Serengeti and the rest
For videos, articles, ideas and news from Africa:
Have a look at our blog at safarigeek.com
1747 898 104Do you need some help with this?
At Natural High, we've all lived and worked in Africa, so our knowledge is born of
hands-on experience rather than simply visiting on holiday. We can't over-stress how
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