Tour Company
To keep costs down we decided to cut out the middle man and book direct, via the internet. We looked at length for recommendations on web pages, books and personal accounts and seemed to keep coming up with the same name, Zara Tanzania Adventures. One of the best books on the area is 'Kilimanjaro and Mount Kenya' by Cameron M. Burns (published by CORDEE - ISBN 1-871890-98-5) that mentions Zara as being the best outfitter. A major specialist trek company in the UK also uses Zara and lots of personal accounts also recommended them. We were persuaded !!
It is slightly confusing as a third party runs Zara's main web page, and any contact via these pages goes to them (and costs more !!). If however you contact Zara direct at zara@Kilinet.co.tz they are very helpful and you can save 15-20% of the cost. This saving is at the expense of any ABTA type guarantee however.
We dealt with Zainab Ansell (one of the owners of the company) via Email to make all our arrangements. She was extremely helpful and all the arrangements ran very smoothly. She effortlessly accommodated our last minute change to add an extra day to our itinerary and also helped sort out our luggage problems. In a country such as Tanzania it is comforting to have somebody who knows the ropes to help when things go wrong. A driver was being sent to chase our lost bag before we even asked if it was possible. With all the clients Zainab has on Safari and on Kili at any time, it never failed to amaze us that she instantly knew everything about our arrangements and kept track of our baggage problems. We were very impressed and would thoroughly recommend Zara to anybody planning either a trek or safari in Tanzania.
Zara's website managed by EWP in UK