Day 66 – “Good guy, bad guy – that’s how we do it”

Arusha - Le Jacaranda Hotel

Today we learnt a number of things about booking safaris in Tanzania – whether we’ve learnt enough though is yet to be confirmed!

We walked into town this morning to start arranging a safari into Serengeti and Ngorongoro parks. First stop was the Tanzanian Tourist Board – they manage a list of registered operators, as well as a blacklist of bad operators. They were very helpful, and gave us a few pointers, and a useful map. Unfortunately though they don’t make recommendations – we still had to do the legwork ourselves.

Part of our "posse" waiting for us outside a tour office

After we left the TTB, it didn’t take long for us to attract the attentions of a number of touts trying to sell us their safari company – outside the TTB is an ideal place for them to hang out. We ended up with quite a posse as we walked around town searching for safari operators – it’s low season, and obviously the competition is pretty fierce here at the moment.

We visited a few operators, including the one that tried to sign us up last night. By the time we’d reached their office, we had about 5 people following us. In true rock star fashion we escaped out the back door and through a side gate, and thought we had given them the slip – but there was one tenacious guy that appeared 10 minutes later and just wouldn’t leave us alone! K lost her cool with him a couple of times but he wasn’t fazed – all he said was “that’s how we live here”. M found out he was a cook trying to get safari work – but as we weren’t in the market for a camping safari, he was probably wasting his time.

We worked pretty hard to get a good deal, revisiting a couple of operators to negotiate better prices, all of them pretty much offering the same itinerary. We had decided after our first visit that we wanted a 5 day / 4 night safari – we just needed to finalise the operator and price, and our good guy / bad guy approach to bargaining came in handy (we’ll leave you to guess which one of us played “bad guy” …..).

We thought we’d done enough research to identify our preferred operator (let’s call them XXXX for now), so headed back to the hotel to hit the internet for some final checking – only to find a post on the Lonely Planet website saying “avoid XXXX at all costs!”. We didn’t want to risk it – we’re talking about 5 days here, and the last thing we want is to be stuck on a crap safari for the sake of a few dollars. So what followed was some frantic googling and re-reading of our Lonely Planet to double check some of the other operators we’d visited – we had hoped to get away tomorrow, and it was getting late!

We finally settled on one of the more expensive, but better credentialed operators. We called them up around 3:30pm, then nervously waited for them to confirm we could go tomorrow – otherwise we’d have to spend another day in Arusha! The call came through – it was confirmed – pickup at 9am tomorrow.

So, after all this, here are some tips on arranging a safari in Arusha from a couple of people who didn't do enough research up front!

1. It’s perfectly feasible to wait until you get to Arusha to make your booking (in low season anyway – we can’t comment on high season) – but still do your research on safari operators before you get there (we didn’t!). Use your guidebook, TripAdvisor, Google, etc. to get a list together, and then visit your shortlist. Also check to see if there are any near your hotel (we didn’t, and found out too late that there was a well regarded operator about 200m from where we were staying!).

2. If the company has pushy touts, maybe it’s a sign you should avoid the company altogether. They are very hard to avoid, but if you know where you’re going they can be more easily ignored than if you’re just wandering around like we did.

3. When trying to negotiate a good deal, if there’s lots of calculator button pushing, speaking in Swahili, and general delaying tactics in coming back with a price or yes/no answer, maybe there’s something fishy going on. That happened to us a couple of times – whereas the more reputable ones were able to come back much quicker, or even just said that they weren’t able to reduce their price at all.

Arusha Clock Tower - at the halfway point between Cape Town and Cairo

4. These safaris are expensive – so the company should have credit card facilities, as it’s not that practical to carry large amounts of cash (especially Tanzanian shillings). Note however that credit card also has a 5% fee. The “budget” operators were cash only. In all cases though, payment is required up front. If you’re going to pay cash, plan ahead – we were caught out on this, so even after 8 ATM withdrawals today, we still need to make more ATM visits tomorrow before we leave!

5. If you want to go on safari at short notice (i.e. next day like us) then try to make your selection and finalise your booking as early in the day as possible. We’ve been told that lodge bookings and park fees need to be paid in advance, and if you don’t leave enough time for your tour company to do this you can lose a day (as we almost did).

6. If you're unsure of who you're going to go with, carry your internet (e.g. iphone) with you, so you can research a company quickly. We didn’t, so we lost time going back to the hotel afterward, if we had our phone we could have ruled out the questionable companies much earlier.

It remains to be seen whether we've made the right decision ….. we’ll let you know in about 5 days time (and if anyone is interested in knowing who we rejected and who we went with, send us a message via this blog!).