Our Unqualified Recommendation for Earthlife Expeditions!
This review may be slightly different in content. Like all of the others, we saw magnificent animals in their natural settings. We saw "kills" in process, we saw a lioness spend 30+ minutes stalking a wildebeest, only to miss! I think virtually every Safari company (and there are many, many companies!) will do a good job of ensuring you see all of these beautiful animals. We think the service from your Safari company is what makes the difference, and we think Earthlife excelled in these areas. Or Safari adventure began in 2020, pre-Covid. When everything went on hold, we decided to leave our deposit with Earthlife. We were ensured by Earthlife that they would be there waiting for us when we were ready to travel. Various things delayed our trip until 2024, but completely true to their word, when we contacted Earthlife in late 2023 it was like being greeted by old friends. We worked with Inno at Earthlife to review all of our original plans and to get things started again. The process worked smoothly, and after reviewing what was available now versus 2020, we made a few changes that we felt made our Safari even better. To start, we learned various standards of lodging were available. We said we would like the "most authentic" African experience, and Earthlife delivered. We could have chosen lodgings that were more luxurious, but we would not have changed a thing. We felt lodgings, from city hotels to upscale lodges, to tented camps were perfect. Accommodations were excellent, food very good, and service impeccable. Our trip started in Rwanda with a Gorilla Trek (HIGHLY RECOMMENDED) and Earthlife made sure everything worked smoothly. We were met at the airport and escorted to a short Visa line (we waited until arrival to get our Visa - it only took 10 minutes in Kigali) and a short customs line. The same person retrieved our checked luggage and escorted us to meet our driver. What a great greeting. If you do the Trek, you will have a different driver / guide for this portion of your trip. Our driver was excellent, and we were asked before we started if it would be OK for a guide in training to ride along. We agreed, and it was great, as we essentially had two guides for this portion of our trip. The Gorilla Trek is inspiring. My wife was worried about this part of the trip, but it was definitely a highlight to her. We were led to a family of 22 gorillas, and we saw 20 members of the family. Your lead guide will allow you to come within the prescribed distance (wearing masks!), and then you stop. You are plenty close to get a true sense of these wonderful beings. After 3 days in Rwanda, we travelled to Arusha (again using "instant" Visa - not quite as fast as Kigali, but the entire process was approximately 30 minutes) and driven to our lovely hotel in Kigali. We chose two nights there, to be certain we were well rested before beginning our Safari. Inno came to our hotel to introduce himself and to welcome us to Africa. A very nice touch!The day our safari started we met our new best friend / driver / guide - Makuru. We loved him. He is a very experienced guide and grew up in a small village that abuts the Serengeti National Park, so he is intimately familiar with the area.We chose to do a "private" safari, so it was two of us and our driver / guide (see below) in our Land Cruiser. That choice gave us freedom to move around the cruiser freely, to any position where we felt best at the moment. But don't worry, the Land Cruisers provide plenty of space for groups. Because it was just the two of us in our Land Cruiser, and the expertise of Makuru, we even made a couple of small adjustments to our itinerary. We appreciated this flexibility. Just a quick side note, and I don't know how he accomplished this, but every morning our Land Cruiser was spotless and dustless! Makuru had a huge amount of information to share with us, but also had a near perfect sense when to share that knowledge, and when to just let us look, enjoy and sometimes be awed. If you have Makuru you will be in awe of his knowledge of all of the birds of the Serengeti. Additionally, Makuru had a knack for knowing where and when to go to locations. A few times we were far away from most of the other vehicles, but he always had a reason, and often we saw animals without being part of a large crowd. This kind of guiding made our Safari even more memorable. We also think the non-Safari time we spend in Kigali and Arusha were very important to the success of our trip. Earthlife did an excellent job of setting up these expeditions as part of the total trip. We were in awe of so much of what we saw.I should have been shorter and just said, we unequivocally recommend Earthlife Expeditions.