Plan your own Tanzania safari, what you do yourself and what you hand over

You can arrange a trip to Tanzania yourself, and you can get further with it than most websites will tell you.

The flights, the visa, Zanzibar and the days in between are all yours to book. Some people enjoy that part most of all, and it works.

Other people would rather have one contact for the whole thing, from the moment they land to the morning they fly home. That is what we do.

So here is what you can do yourself, where the work starts to grow, and what we would take off your hands.

What you arrange yourself, and that is more than you think

Most of this trip does not need us, and we would rather say so here than let you find it out somewhere else.

The flight. Fly into Kilimanjaro Airport if your trip starts in the north, because that is the right side of the country. Land at Dar es Salaam instead and you have put yourself on the wrong side, with a domestic flight to add. Compare the fares yourself, they move with the month and the routing.

The visa. Apply online with Tanzanian immigration, upload your details, and it comes back by email. Do it a few weeks ahead and print it, because the wifi at the airport is not something to rely on.

Insurance and vaccinations. Arrange your travel insurance yourself and check that it covers adventurous activities. For vaccinations and malaria tablets go to your own travel clinic or your doctor, because the advice depends on your route and your health, and it is not ours to give.

Money. Draw dollars or Tanzanian shillings at a bank in Arusha or Moshi. Lodges and camps take cards. Cash is for the small things, the tips and the markets.

There are longer pages in our knowledge base on the visa, the best time to travel, malaria and flying to Tanzania, so this page does not do that work twice.

Zanzibar, what you book yourself and what hangs off it

You can book a hotel on Zanzibar yourself, the way you would book one anywhere in the world. The things that make the mainland difficult do not apply out there.

The transfer is the catch. You can take the ferry from Dar es Salaam, about two hours, or fly from Arusha, Kilimanjaro or a Serengeti airstrip, about an hour and a half. The flight goes at a fixed time, and that time decides whether you still get a game drive on your last morning. Book the hotel and the flight separately and you can end up with a day that does not work. We plan that transfer as one piece, from the last game drive to the beach.

Do the safari first and Zanzibar after. You arrive at the coast rested rather than wrung out by early starts and long drives.

And the decision that matters is which coast, not which hotel. The east has the clearest water and the biggest tidal range, so there are hours when you cannot swim. The north is less affected by the tide and busier. Booking sites do not show you that difference.

Arrange Zanzibar yourself by all means, and tell us before we plan the safari, because the day you cross decides the day the safari ends.

Where Tanzania works differently from what you are used to

This is where most people planning their own trip come unstuck, and it is the part that is different from other destinations in a way that catches people out.

Park entry is charged per person for every twenty-four hours, with a separate fee per vehicle, and it is paid electronically at the gate or in advance. Not in cash. People who have not read that beforehand end up working it out at a gate.

At the Ngorongoro Crater you cannot drive down yourself. A certified guide is required and the gate checks it.

Distances here are measured in hours rather than kilometres. Arusha to the Serengeti is a long day, much of it unpaved, and it is not a road for an ordinary hire car. Moving from one northern park to the next costs you about half a day each time.

And the north and the south are two separate trips. The Serengeti, Ngorongoro, Tarangire and Lake Manyara you reach by road from Arusha. Ruaha and Nyerere are much further and you fly. You cannot put both of them into ten days.

Driving yourself is allowed and almost nobody does it. The park tracks are demanding, help is a long way off, and a guide who drives that ground every week knows where the animals have been this month. That is worth more than what the car costs.

Where it turns into more work than you expect

Three things make the safari part heavier than the rest of the trip, and all three are manageable once you know about them.

Availability. The camps in the northern Serengeti have a handful of tents each and they fill up months ahead in migration season. Start looking in May for August and there is not much left to choose from.

Paying. Camps do not take the instant bank payments you are used to at home. You send an international transfer in dollars, with the fees and the delay that come with it, to a company you have no way of checking.

Changes. A road goes under after rain, a camp moves your booking, a domestic flight is rescheduled. With separate bookings nobody is holding the thread, and you are the one making the phone calls.

Some people handle all of that well. It still helps to have somebody on the ground who picks up the phone.

Everything through one contact, if you would rather

People who do not want to research the safari themselves usually end up with a local Tanzanian operator. The travel bloggers who arrange everything else themselves say the same thing.

The trouble is that the booking platforms list hundreds of operators, all of them writing in English, and from the outside you cannot tell who answers the phone, how long the company has existed, or who will be driving.

We are one of those local operators. We are based in Moshi. Ngomi is a zoologist and has driven this ground his whole life. We use our own guides and our own vehicles, the two camps in the northern Serengeti, Kimbilio Lobo and Kimbilio Bologonja, are ours, and we are members of TATO, the Tanzania Association of Tour Operators, which you can check with TATO rather than taking it from us.

So you deal with the company that does the work, with nobody in between.

We plan the whole thing, from landing at Kilimanjaro to flying home. A night in Moshi or Arusha before the safari starts, the parks in the order that suits the month you are coming, the Zanzibar flight, the transfers, and one number to call.

It is not all or nothing either. Plenty of our guests book their own flight and leave the rest to us, and that changes nothing about how we work.

What it saves you, and who this is not for

Booking directly with a Tanzanian operator takes out the margin of an agency in your own country. That is the whole of the difference.

It does not make the trip cheap. The park fees are the park fees, the small camps are expensive because they are small, and a guided vehicle costs what it costs whether you booked it or we did. Direct is better arranged, not cheaper.

So if the lowest price is what you are after, we are probably not the right company. We build private trips with your own guide and your own vehicle, and we do not run group tours.

And if you enjoy the planning, do it. We also work with people who have half a plan already and want only the safari part arranged.

Most people who write to us have been reading for weeks before they do, so the conversation tends to start further along than you would think.

If you want to carry on, send us what you have. We will tell you what fits, what is not possible in that month, and roughly what it costs. And if you would rather see what a trip looks like first, start with our sample itineraries.

Safari njema.