Dan's Adventure

For the last 6 weeks I have been travelling through Africa with Acacia Africa. I joined their Kenya to Cape Town tour in Nairobi and continued to travel south through Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi, Zambia, Botswana, Namibia and finally South Africa. When researching companies to travel Africa with I found it very difficult to find any information on them other than the marketing stuff that they put online, no actual experiences from people that had travelled with them previously. Even forums such as on Lonely Planet and Boots’n'All, information from people that had travelled with companies such as Acacia, and there are lots of them, was lacking. Hopefully this review will help others in their decision making.

Tour style

Acacia Africa, along with companies such as Dragoman, Intrepid, Tucan and ATC, run what are known as overland tours. Their itineraries include a number of highlights and you basically travel between each of them over the allocated period of time. On each of the tours everyone is actively involved. In addition to pitching your own tent each day, you will more than likely have a task to complete from the group’s rota. The tasks aren’t anything to worry about and essentially keep things running smoothly. Tasks typically include helping to prepare meals, cleaning the inside of the truck, washing the dishes and loading/unloading the bulky and heavy items from the truck. The tasks rotate, so there is no chance of you being stuck on dishes for the entire six weeks!

Sleeping

The Kenya to Cape Town tour with Acacia is a budget tour meaning that it is camping all the way. The tents are fairly standard, from what I saw every company uses the same style of tent, single piece dome tents with collapsible poles. It took a bit of time to put it up and take it down the first couple of days, but after that it was pretty easy. Acacia Africa provide a sleeping mat, but you will need your own sleeping bag and pillow. Do yourself a favour and make sure you get a decent sleeping bag, some nights and mornings were absolutely freezing, yes, it does get cold in Africa.

Most nights were spent at campsites with facilities such as flushing toilets, showers which occasionally had hot water, and there was always a bar, some even had internet. Some nights however were spent at bush camps with minimal to no facilities. The Okavango Delta was the one true bush camping experience with a hole in the ground for a toilet and a shovel to indicate that it was in use. Whilst in the Serengeti and Ngorongoro Crater the campsites did still have toilets, albeit squat ones, but once the water tanks were empty that was it – no showers and no flushing. At Windhoek and Swakopmund we were surprised with three nights of hostel accommodation. The only other time that we weren’t in the tents was on Zanzibar when we had to pay for our own accommodation, the booking of which was organised by the tour leader.

Eating

The food was the one thing that I was apprehensive about before starting the tour. Luckily I wasn’t the only vegetarian in the group so that meant that more vegetarian food was bought which helped to keep it a bit more varied.

Since this was a budget tour, meals were prepared by the group every day. Everyone took a turn of helping to chop and peel vegetables, slice cheese etc. Each day a breakfast of cereals and bread with lots of spreads was provided and a few times we were surprised with a cooked breakfast. Lunches consisted of salad sandwiches and whatever was leftover from the previous evening’s meals, and dinners varied greatly. Stuffed peppers, butternut squash with peanut butter, stir fry, gem squash with corn all featured and for those that eat meat substitutes there was a lot of soya based things available. For the carnivores, red meat was the staple of most meals; sausages, steaks and game meat. The food was always plentiful so no one ever went hungry. The tour leaders introduced us to traditional dishes including variations on a maize thing that looked like mashed potato but tasted like nothing until you added some sauce, peanut butter and cabbage which was surprisingly good, and peas, banana, condensed milk and mayonnaise all combined to form a salad which was just wrong.

There were a few occasions where we had to buy our own meals, notably on Zanzibar, Livingston and Swakopmund, where we were expected to fend for ourselves due to the high probability that people would be gone on various excursions and activities. This isn’t too clear in the Acacia Africa brochure as only Zanzibar is explicitly mentioned.

Travel buddies

Acacia Africa’s trucks can have a maximum of 24 passengers, leaving Nairobi we had 23. What I didn’t realise before hand is that the Kenya to Cape Town tour is actually comprised of several smaller tours. When we reached Zanzibar 7 people left and another 3 joined. At Livingston, the majority left and only 8 of us from Nairobi continued to Cape Town along with 9 others and we picked up a further 2 in Windhoek. That is perhaps something that Acacia Africa should make clearer in the information they provide about the tour as I had expected to be travelling with the same people for the entire trip. On reflection though, the change was good, new people helped to keep things interesting.

According to our guides, 95% of the passengers are female, this certainly held true for the first half of the tour down to Livingston. Until Zanzibar, the group consisted of 6 couples, 4 girls travelling together, 6 girls travelling on their own, and myself. After Zanzibar, 3 couples and 1 of the girls left, and 2 new girls and a guy joined. In Livingston however the group changed completely and it was almost a 50/50 split between guys and girls.

Age wise, the majority of the group were between mid 20s and mid 30s, it was a good mix with different backgrounds and experiences. As for nationalities, the majority were English with a few Scots, Dutch, Germans, Australians and Kiwis thrown in for good measure. A key element to a tour such as this is how well the group interact, and fortunately, a few personality clashes aside, everyone had a great time together.

Transport

A large part of the 6 weeks was spent on the road. The trucks are equipped with fairly comfortable seats, configured with 2 sets of 4 facing each other with a table in between, and the rest facing forward. It would have been more social for more seats to be facing each other, but to be honest the table was useless most of the time anyway due to the degree of bumpiness when driving. Prepare yourself for a lot of bumpy rides, the roads between Kenya and Zambia aren’t anywhere near good. Most are no more than dirt tracks laced with pot holes, but the roads do improve dramatically when you get further south though.

Inside the truck there is plenty of storage space for luggage. Everyone gets a rucksack sized locker and valuables are also safely stored. Cooler boxes are provided to keep everyone’s soft drinks, beer and chocolate cold although the coolness depends on the availability of ice. There’s an amp and speakers in the truck which any music player with a standard headphone socket can be plugged into. With music tastes ranging from Beyonce to Slayer finding an acceptable selection of music did prove to be a challenge. There were days of pop, others of rock and some complete cheese.

Days on the truck could be very long, I’ll get onto that more in the itinerary section, and invariably consisted of playing some cards, trying to read and a lot of sleeping. The heat made everyone pretty tired as the trucks have no more than African air conditioning – windows open if you want to keep cool.

Compared to other companies, Acacia Africa did come out favourably when it came to trucks. Only Tucan appeared to have newer trucks (they even had reclining seats) which is due to the fact that they’ve only just started operating in Africa. Several trucks had roll down tarpaulin windows rather than the plastic of Acacia Africa’s and many had luggage secured to the roof rather than inside. Despite all the dodgy roads, the trucks didn’t encounter any problems at all.

Itinerary

The itinerary for the tour is on the most part fantastic, but there are a few things I would suggest to Acacia Africa that they change. The first is in regards to the local payment. Several activities are listed as optional when they really aren’t optional at all. Realistically, who would choose not to go to the Okavango Delta or on safari in Chobe? Something that isn’t made clear is that if you choose not to do the activities, you’ll be pretty much left on your own in the campsite. The second is that several cities are mentioned in the itinerary when in reality you will see no more than a shopping centre, supermarket or hostel. When we stopped in cities we were generally told “There is a shop over there, toilets that way, money exchange over there and an internet cafe to the right. Be back in an hour.”. I’m sure everyone will agree that stopping at the shops is a bit different from visiting a city. Lastly, I completely underestimated the amount of driving that we would be doing. There were days where we’d get up at the crack of dawn, drive all day, arrive at the campsite at maybe 5pm, have dinner and that was the day over. I know there were vast distances to cover, but breaking the journey up a bit more would have been nice.

The ‘highlights’ listed in Acacia Africa’s tour information are what you can take as being the real itinerary. Its an awesome mixture of wildlife, beaches, activities and amazing landscapes.

A number of the ‘highlights’ are outsourced to third parties, but these third parties aren’t always up to scratch. The companies used at the Masai Mara and Serengeti in particular did not make such a good impression. It wasn’t really clear until safaris later on that we realised that the guides should actually be telling us about the reserves and about the animals, not just pointing at a lion or elephant. In addition to the guides being poor, their vehicles continually broke down. I appreciate its a tough environment, but these companies are simply not maintaining their vehicles. After our excursion to the Serengeti and the crater where we broke down continuously, the same vehicles were back out for another group the following day with no work done on them at all. Push starting jeeps wasn’t mentioned in the itinerary.

Guides

Acacia Africa provides a tour leader and a driver on each tour. The driver drives and the tour leader is meant to organise accommodation, food, excursions, keep everyone informed and generally keep things moving smoothly. For those defined roles, the guides throughout my trip with Acacia did a good job.

As I mentioned earlier, I joined a different truck in Livingston to Cape Town and at this point the tour leader and driver changed. The new leader and driver, Jacques and JP, were so much more organised than the original two, Fiona and Blessed, and this made everything go a lot smoother. From little things like the rota tasks being more sensibly split to them taking on the majority of the food preparation, it made the experience go from good to fantastic. They were both far more knowledgeable and informative too. Jacques actually acted as a safari guide for us in Etosha and it was without doubt the best safari I went on due to the amount I learnt.

The quality of the guides really can make all the difference between a good trip and a fantastic trip, but to be honest if the guides hadn’t changed, I would have been none the wiser and would still have come out pleased with my experience.

Cost

When comparing overland tours, cost obviously played a big factor. Every operator uses a local payment element in addition to an up front payment, some offering a low up front payment but then almost everything is an ‘optional’ local payment which as I mentioned earlier is a bit daft. Most of the companies offer big discounts throughout the year, I don’t think there was a single person on my tour that paid full price, but remember that the discounts are only on the up front payment. Acacia Africa was actually one of the cheaper companies, Intrepid, Dragoman and Tucan, all charge a bit more and I can’t really see why as they follow almost an identical route.

Apart from the local payment, you will need to factor in money for any activities that you want to do along the way and money for snacks, water and alcohol. There isn’t drinking water available from the truck so you will either need to purify and possibly filter the water yourself or buy bottles for most of the way. The tap water was fine to drink from Botswana onwards so from there I just kept refilling a 5 litre bottle which I would decant into a smaller one. Overall I spent around $1500 on top of the local payment which includes 2 days in Nairobi at the start and 4 days in Cape Town afterwards. I took all of my money in dollars because I wasn’t sure how readily available ATMs would be, but as I found out, where ever there was a Bureau de Change, there would be an ATM nearby.

Summary

The Acacia Africa Kenya to Cape Town tour provided me with an awesome start to my round the world trip. I enjoyed every minute of it. I think I was very lucky to be with such a great group of people and the guides in the second half made it even better. Its hard to believe that over the 43 days I saw all of the big five, saw elephants in the campsite, white water rafted on the Zambezi, saw sunrise from dune 45 and camped out in the Okavango Delta. It may have been a whistle stop tour, but it was a great introduction to Africa.