Your guide makes your safari
A guest looks at the same tree for an hour and sees a tree. The guide stops, points, and waits. Then you see a leopard’s tail hanging over a branch, and after that you see the animal itself, and after that you cannot work out how you ever looked straight past it.
That difference is not luck. It is somebody who knows where to look, because he has seen it hundreds of times before.
You can drive the same route in Tanzania, in the same month, with the same parks on your programme, and come home with two completely different trips. The difference is sitting in the seat in front of you.
What a guide does, beyond the driving
He drives, and that is the smallest part of it. He reads the landscape. Fresh tracks in the sand, birds lifting off above a bush, impala all standing and looking the same way, a smell that hangs about. Out of small things like that he makes a decision: we stay here, or we drive on.
He decides on the day. Not off a schedule, because wildlife does not keep to schedules. He knows the park, he knows the season, and he knows what happens in this spot in this week of the year.
And he talks. About the animal in front of you, and also about the country, the people, the language, his own family. A lot of guests tell us afterwards that they learned as much about Tanzania as they did about animals.
How somebody becomes a guide with us
This is the part most travellers never see, and the part we are proudest of.
Many of our guides did not come to us as guides. They started as waiters in one of our own tented camps in the Serengeti. Out there they learn two things at once: how to be around guests, and what it is to work in the bush. A long way from anything, with elephants walking past the tents at night, in a camp where you depend on each other.
Whoever has it in him, and wants it, takes the next step. Then he rides along with a senior guide. Not for a day or a week, but for a long time. He listens, he watches, he learns the routes, he learns the animals, and he learns how you answer a guest’s question when you are not certain of the answer.
Only when he is ready for it does he start driving and guiding himself.
That is a programme that runs for years. It is slow and it is expensive and we do it anyway, because we believe it is how you end up with the best guides. Not learned in a classroom, but learned from the inside, with us, in our camps, with our guests.
What they all have in common
They speak good English, and they know the animals, the birds and the trees. That is the baseline, and that is where we start rather than where we finish.
What guests mention afterwards is almost never the knowledge. It is the patience. That he stayed half an hour at a leopard because you had not got a good photograph yet. That by day three he knows you like birds better than cats, and that the next day his route quietly changes. That he remembers your name, and your children’s names, and where you come from.
They give their level best. That is not a rule we wrote down somewhere. That is how they are.
One vehicle, one guide, the whole trip
You travel your entire trip with the same guide in the same vehicle. No changeovers per park, no new driver at every camp, no explaining again what you like to see.
That sounds like a small thing. It is not. On day one he knows nothing about you. By day four he knows you want to leave early, that you would rather sit still at a sighting, and that your daughter wants to know everything about hyenas. The trip gets better every day, and that only works if it is the same man.
No counting the miles
Mileage limits and a fixed number of game drive hours a day are common in this industry. What it means in practice is that at some point your guide has to do arithmetic instead of looking.
We do not work that way. The vehicles are ours, we deal with the fuel, and the guide decides. If you want to stay three hours longer because the animals are showing themselves, you stay. If you want to drive the long way round because something has been reported on the other side of the park, you go.
This is probably the biggest practical difference between a safari with us and a safari somewhere else, and it is the kind of thing you only notice once you have had it the other way.
The small things
A cool box with cold water and a couple of beers in it, without you having to ask. A chair set out for you when you stop somewhere for lunch. A guide who takes your camera off you because he knows exactly which angle will get that animal properly in frame.
Nobody books a safari for any of that. Everybody tells you about it afterwards.
Your guide at dinner
In our own camps the guide often eats with the guests. That is not a rule, it just happens. After a day together in a vehicle you end up at the same table in the evening, and then it is about Tanzania, about school, about how things are at home, about politics, about football.
For a lot of guests that is the moment the trip turns from a holiday into something else.
Why they stay
Guides who start with us usually stay a long time. Some of them have been here almost as long as we have.
That is not an accident. We are a family business, we live here, and Ngomi and I know every person who drives for us personally. They are paid properly, they have work the whole year round rather than only in high season, and they get the room to grow.
And you notice that as a guest. Somebody who feels valued by the people he works for treats you differently from somebody on a casual job.
Who will be driving you
We have our own fleet and a core group of guides on the payroll. In high season we add freelancers we have worked with for years and know personally.
Which guide you get depends on your route, your travel date and what you are after. Travelling with children, we take that into account. Birder or photographer, the same. That is not a lottery, it is a choice we make.
Ngomi, my husband, is a zoologist and has been driving safari for thirty years himself. He has watched most of them start.
One last thing
Your guide is not in the itinerary and he is not on the invoice. He is the one part of your safari you will talk about by name afterwards.
Would you rather talk it through first? Plan a call.