Safari and Zanzibar

A safari is wonderful and it is exhausting. You are up at five, you spend hours on dirt tracks and you change accommodation every second night. By the eighth day the body asks you to stop.

Zanzibar is an hour and a quarter by air from the same airport you leave the savannah by. It is not a separate destination you have to shoehorn in: it is the natural continuation of the trip, and the contrast between the two halves is what makes people remember it the way they do.

The order matters and it only runs one way: safari first, beach afterwards. The other way round you arrive in the savannah already in holiday mode and you go home off the back of a 5am start.

The ratio that works best is two thirds safari, one third beach. With twelve usable days: seven or eight on safari and four or five on Zanzibar.

Fewer than four nights on the island does not repay the transfer. And fewer than five days of safari forces you to drop the Serengeti, which is exactly what you came for.

If the trip is shorter, eight or nine days, there are two honest routes: cut the safari back to Tarangire and Ngorongoro and keep three nights of beach, or leave Zanzibar for another trip. Forcing both in goes badly.

We arrange the internal flight along with the rest of the trip: you leave from an airstrip in the Serengeti or from Arusha airport and land on Zanzibar. Small aircraft, with a baggage limit of around 15 kg in a soft bag.

The flight home usually leaves from Zanzibar airport itself, so there is no need to go back to the mainland. That saves a whole day.

Beach accommodation is chosen separately and on the same basis as the safari one: anything from simple hotels on the sand to large resorts. Which part of the island matters more than the category, and we go into that on the Zanzibar page.

And there is one extra formality to account for: since 2024 Zanzibar requires its own compulsory travel insurance, separate from yours. It is cheap and you arrange it online, but it is worth having done before you fly.