At six in the morning you are in the Serengeti with a pair of binoculars on your knees. At three in the afternoon you are walking barefoot on a beach. Same day.
That day comes round every week here, and it is the one guests bring up with us afterwards. Not the lion, and not the beach. How fast the one turned into the other.
They tell us it felt like two holidays inside one trip. That is the idea.
The last morning
One more game drive out on the plain. It is often the calmest drive of the whole trip, because there is nothing left to tick off and you watch without a list running in your head.
Back at camp your bag is already packed. You have breakfast, you say goodbye to the people who have looked after you all week, and you drive out to the airstrip.
Airstrip is the right word for it. At Kogatende or Seronera it is a gravel strip with a windsock and a bench under a tree. No terminal, no departure board. Your guide waits with you until the plane is down, and there are usually impala grazing a hundred metres off.
What you take and what you leave behind
The aircraft that fly to the coast are small, and the baggage allowance is real. Twenty kilos in the hold, around forty-four pounds, plus five kilos of hand luggage, about eleven, in a soft bag. Some of the smaller flights carry fifteen plus five, and your e-ticket says which one you are on. A hard suitcase does not fit the hold. That is a question of shape, not a rule somebody invented.
So plan for this day when you are packing at home, and bring a soft holdall rather than a hard-shell trolley. The dust comes with you either way. You will find red sand in the folds of your trousers when you unpack at the coast.
Two of our guests wrote about that part of it afterwards.
Nick spent his last days at a quiet place on the coast, washing off the red dust of the safari. Nick
James found the quiet down at the coast a welcome contrast to the long days in the jeep. James
The flight, from brown to green to blue
The aircraft is a Cessna Caravan with thirteen seats. The pilot walks out with you and gets in with you. There is no crew and no aisle, and if you are sitting at the front you can watch the instruments over his shoulder.
Once you are up, you see the plain from above with the herd paths drawn across it like pencil lines. Then it changes underneath you. Brown and gold savannah, then green hills and farmland as you come towards the coast, then blue water with a white edge to it.
The flight usually puts down once or twice at other strips to pick people up. That is not a delay, it is how the route works, and whoever climbs in may well have a rucksack full of dust with him.
What you notice first when you land on Zanzibar is the air. Warm, heavy, salt in it, after a week of the dry sharp air up in the Serengeti. Your shoes can come off, and most of our guests leave them off for the rest of the week.
Why we put the safari first and the beach after
A safari is intensive. You are up before sunrise five or six days running, you are alert all day, and every day puts a different landscape and something you have not seen before in front of you. You come off a safari full rather than short of sleep.
Somebody who does the beach first arrives at the safari rested, and then goes home full. What they saw never gets time to settle. They board the plane with the Serengeti still in their head and they are back at a desk three days later.
The safari is the breath in and Zanzibar is the breath out. The order matters, because a breath does not work the other way round.
There is a practical side as well. You land in the north, where the safari starts, and you fly home from the coast, where the beach week ends. The geography only runs one way, so we build the trip in that direction and nothing doubles back on itself.
How many nights on Zanzibar after your safari
Three to four nights is the least that makes a difference. One night in Stone Town and two days on a beach. You go home with the feeling that something sat between the savannah and your own front door.
Four to six nights is where most of our guests land, and where they are happiest about it afterwards. That gives you Stone Town, a beach rhythm, and a boat out to Mnemba if you want one, without any of it turning into a schedule.
Six nights and up suits people who want to be properly gone for a while. That is no trouble and we are glad to build it that way.
We do not put a fixed number on every trip. It depends on the days you have, the kind of safari you did first, whether you want to dive or lie still, and whether you are travelling with children.
What we would do with your days
You have a set number of days, and somebody has to divide them. The answer is different for every trip and every season.
On a two-week trip in the migration season we will often put the weight in the north. An extra day at the river can be the difference between watching the herds cross and being told you missed it by a day. A third day on the beach is pleasant, and so was the second, and those two are not worth the same. So we say so, and sometimes we will tell you to take one beach night fewer than you asked for.
It runs the other way too. If you are travelling in the green months, or you have been on safari before, an extra day on the coast is often worth more than another day inside a park.
Nothing gets taken away and nothing gets added. The days go where they do the most, and the proposal says what we would do ourselves.
You do not put this day together yourself. The flight, the timing, how it sits against your last game drive, whether it is worth a night in Stone Town first, all of that is our job.
There is a fourteen-day example trip that shows where this day falls and how the rest of the route is built around it.
And if you do not know which coast suits you, the short version is that in the north you can swim all day, while on the east coast the water pulls back a couple of hundred metres at low tide. What that means for your week is on our Zanzibar page and on the beaches blog.
Safari njema.
