Hotels & Stays

This is what most people mean when they say "safari camp", and it is the accommodation we recommend to first-timers who are unsure. A luxury tented camp is not camping. You get a proper bed with good linen, an en-suite bathroom with a flush toilet and hot shower, a private veranda, and canvas between you and the Serengeti.

What canvas buys you is sound. You hear hyena whooping at two in the morning, lions calling across the plain, elephants moving through camp. Guests who arrive nervous about the tent almost always name that as the best part of the trip. There is a reason the industry's most expensive properties are tented rather than built.

Camps are small — usually eight to sixteen tents — so the atmosphere is communal. You eat with other guests, you talk around a fire, and the staff learn your name by the second evening.

A lodge is a permanent structure — stone, timber, thatch — with rooms or chalets scattered around a central building holding the restaurant, bar and often a pool. If you have stayed in a good hotel, you know the shape of it.

Lodges suit people who want predictability. Air conditioning in the hotter parks, a bathtub, a pool for the dead middle of the day, buffet dining, and the reassurance of a solid door. They tend to be larger than camps — thirty to a hundred rooms — which means more people and a less intimate feel, but also lower rates for the same location.

The trade-off is immersion. Behind a stone wall you sleep better and hear less. Many guests consider that a fair exchange, particularly families with young children and anyone who is genuinely anxious about canvas.

The original East African safari, and still the best way to follow the Great Migration. A mobile camp is dismantled and rebuilt two or three times a year, positioning itself where the wildlife actually is — the southern plains for calving in February, the Western Corridor by June, the Mara River by August.

The advantage is enormous and often misunderstood: a fixed lodge two hours from the herds gives you four hours of driving a day before you see anything. A mobile camp sited among them gives you those hours back.

Premium mobile camps are genuinely comfortable — en-suite tents, excellent food, good guides. Lower tiers are simpler, with shared or semi-shared facilities. Because they are temporary, they leave almost nothing behind, which is why the Serengeti permits them in areas where permanent building is prohibited.

Smaller and more basic than a tented camp, deliberately. Bush camps drop the décor, the pool and often the mains power, and put what is left into location and guiding. Four to eight tents, a fire, a cook, and a guide who has probably been walking that country for twenty years.

These are the properties where walking safaris and fly-camping tend to originate, and they are common in the southern and western circuits where the whole point is that nobody else is there.

Nobody books a bush camp for the bathroom. People book them because at nine in the evening, with the generator off and no light for forty kilometres, the sky is something they have never seen.

The most affordable way to safari, and a genuinely good one. Our crew pitches the tents, cooks the food and breaks camp; you sleep in a dome tent on a mattress, inside the same national park as the guest paying twenty times as much.

Public campsites have shared ablution blocks and other groups nearby. Special campsites are exclusive-use wilderness sites with no facilities at all — no water, no toilets, nothing — booked to your party alone. The second is more expensive per person and considerably more memorable.

The animals do not know what you paid. A lion walking past a public campsite at dawn is the same lion the luxury camp is watching, and you will remember hearing it through canvas long after you have forgotten a thread count.

Most Tanzanian trips end on the coast, and the accommodation there follows the pattern of any beach destination: guesthouses, boutique hotels and full resorts, at every price point.

The decisions that matter are location rather than star rating. The north of Unguja — Nungwi and Kendwa — is swimmable at all states of the tide, which the east coast is not; at low tide there the water can retreat several hundred metres. Stone Town is for history and food rather than swimming. Mafia and Pemba are far quieter and better for diving.

Ramadan affects opening hours and alcohol service across the archipelago, and it is worth knowing your dates before booking.