Dace's Journal | Safari or Game Drive
How Not to Fall into the Traps
Are the words safari and game drive synonyms? What do they mean, and how are they different? How can you avoid falling into tourist traps?
That is what this blog post in the “Dace’s Journal” series is about.
Safari and game drive are not synonyms – they mean different things. Yet travellers very often confuse these terms. And while an honest tour operator will explain the difference, those looking for the lowest price can easily fall into this trap.
So – what does each of these words mean?
A safari is a journey, and it can include different activities – watching animals from a safari vehicle (game drive), walking in nature (walking safari), hiking in the mountains, swimming at a waterfall, taking a boat trip on a river or lake, visiting tribes, and so on. Every safari has its own programme, and it can be very different.
A game drive, on the other hand, is just one of the activities that can be part of a safari. A game drive means watching animals in a park from a vehicle. A game drive can last a few hours, but it can also take up the whole day – from sunrise to sunset. Depending on the programme, a game drive during a safari can take place in one park or in several parks.
People looking for the lowest prices often see a safari offer and assume that it automatically includes watching animals in a park. It does not. The painful discovery may come during the trip – a game drive is not included in the programme at all, or they have to pay extra for it.
I remember that, when I had just started living in Tanzania and travelling around the national parks, I once saw an advertisement online for a “Mikumi safari” with a picture of a lion and a very low price. I looked at the price for a long time, calculated the costs and finally asked Roman: “How can they offer it at such a low price?” According to my calculations, the price did not even cover the organiser’s direct costs, let alone employees’ salaries and the company’s profit.
Roman took a quick look at the advertisement and, running his finger across the screen, pointed out a sentence in the ad: “Park on the way” (park along the way). That was when I noticed the phrase in small print too. But I still did not understand.
It turned out that this safari did not even enter Mikumi National Park.
A main road runs through Mikumi National Park, connecting the port of Dar es Salaam in the east of the country with the country’s western border. When you drive along this road, sometimes a wild animal happens to be on the road, and sometimes there are none.
If tourists are going to see animals, they turn off the main road and drive into the park, going along the smaller roads, looking for animals and watching them.
In this particular programme, they drive from Dar es Salaam to Mikumi village and then back again. Whichever animal happens to come out of the park onto the road to say hello, well, you have to make do with that.
At the time, Roman told me about information circulating among drivers: people would sometimes only realise, when they reached Mikumi village, that they had been misled and that watching animals inside the park was not part of their programme at all.
They get angry with the driver, but the driver is not really to blame – he is simply following the route his boss has given him. Besides, it would hardly be correct to say that the people had been cheated in a legal sense, because the advertisement clearly said, “park on the way”, and nothing about a game drive was mentioned.
So now, when I drive through Mikumi National Park along the main road and animals happen to come close to the road, I say to myself: very polite animals – they come out to show themselves and take care of those who fell for “park on the way”.
Another place where it is easy to fall into a trap is Ngorongoro.
As you know, there is the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, and inside it is the Ngorongoro Crater. If you want to drive down into the crater, you need to buy two entrance tickets – one for the Ngorongoro Conservation Area and another specifically for the crater.
Here too, people looking for the lowest prices may see “Ngorongoro safari” and assume that it means a drive into the crater. They can be surprised when, having reached the Ngorongoro Conservation Area and the viewpoint by the crater, they realise that this is all – a photo stop with the crater in the background, but there will be no drive down into the crater and no game drive in the crater, because it is not planned and is not included in the programme.
So remember – there is a safari, which means the journey as a whole and can include different activities, and there is a game drive, which specifically means watching animals in a park.
By the way, in Tanzania, outside the tourism industry, the word safari is used to describe any trip or outing. It can be, for example, a journey from the city to the countryside, but it can also mean a trip abroad.
You could say that for international travellers, the safari starts already at the airport.
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About the Author:
Dace Zandfelde is a Northern European entrepreneur living in Tanzania. Together with her Tanzanian husband, Roman Shirima, she co-founded Tanzania Safari Experts – ROM & DACE SAFARIS. Through Dace's Journal, she reflects on the ideas, people and unexpected connections she discovers while living between Europe and East Africa.