Travelling with children
The trip they will talk about for thirty years.
A safari can be the single best thing you ever do with your children, or a long week of hot cars and boredom. The difference is in the planning, and the planning is entirely ours to get right.
Shorter drives, better days.
The commonest mistake in a family safari is an adult's itinerary with children added. Long transfers, dawn starts every day, and six-hour drives will exhaust a nine-year-old and everyone travelling with them.
We build family journeys differently: fewer camps and longer stays in each, shorter drives, a pool at the middle of the day, and game drives timed around attention spans rather than against them. The wildlife does not get any less extraordinary because you were back by eleven.
The right camps, the right guide.
Not every camp welcomes children, and some that say they do are not really built for them. We know which ones have family tents, which have pools, which will happily feed a six-year-old at six o'clock, and which have guides with the patience and the theatre to hold a child's attention across a whole morning.
That guide matters more than anything else on a family trip. A good one turns dung beetles and bird calls into the best part of the day, and that is not a consolation prize. It is genuinely how children fall in love with the wild.
Straight answers
What people ask us.
- What age should children be for a safari?
- In our experience six and up gets genuine value from it, and eight and up remembers it forever. Below that it can still work with the right camp and a very relaxed pace, but be honest with yourself about what a long game drive asks of a small child.
- Are safaris safe for children?
- Yes, with sensible camp choice and a good guide. Many camps have age minimums for exactly this reason, and we will steer you to those that are genuinely set up for families rather than merely tolerant of them.
- What about malaria?
- Some safari regions carry meaningfully lower malaria risk than others, and this is a legitimate factor in where we send families. Speak to us and to your doctor, and we will happily shape the route around the medical advice you are given.
Tailor-made
Build a safari your children can actually enjoy.
Tell us their ages and how they travel, and we will design the pace, the camps and the guide around them.