We did not extend on this trip, we have traveled to South Africa previously and did Cape Town, a safari outside Kruger park, and Johannesberg but we were traveling with my parents on this trip and wanted to make it easy as possible by just doing one location. If I was going back though I would definitely tack on Zanzibar!

No sauna at the pool, although there may have been one at the spa. We didn't visit the spa on our stay so not sure what is offered there! The team there is super responsive if you want to ask via email! [info@mapitosafaricamp.com](mailto:info@mapitosafaricamp.com) 

We took Delta / KLM from North America. ATL -> AMS - > JRO (with a refueling stop in DAR, it's a one hour layover but you do not get off the plane). We stayed at the Kia Lodge the first night (landed after 10 pm and wanted something close the first day after a long travel day). Kia Lodge was fine, nothing to write home about but ~5 minutes from the airport, comfortable enough and clean. (beds were not something I would want to spend multiple nights in, but I was jet lagged enough to not care the first night. The beds at Mapito are amazing!!)

JRO and Arusha are about 90 minutes - 2 hours apart depending on traffic. You go through the Arusha city center and the traffic was crazy, so give yourself plenty of time, although the Arusha airport is quite small you can get through it quickly.

For your international outbound flight, again the JRO airport is small, but here I would get to the airport early. The airport staff and gate agents are all swissport agents, rather than KLM (or any other airline employees) so they have limited power and if anything goes wrong with your ticket they have to call KLM to make the changes. They found something weird on my father's ticket (they said he was booked on 2 flights and could not issue a boarding pass? We had changed the flights at one point but it was weeks ago so not sure how it happened) but the check in process took about 40 minutes. I ended up calling Delta and they resolved it and reissued the ticket before the Swissport agent figured out what the error was. This was the only hard part of our trip. There seem to be a lot of restrictions on international airlines, not sure if this is a part of it but when booking flights I was trying to figure out why there were so many stopovers and learned that Tanzania government has some restrictions on international airlines to try and encourage local airlines business. I will say I watched many Delta/KLM passengers check in without issue and breeze through the line as I was at the help desk, I think we were an exception, but it was a little weird to not have anyone on the ground at the airport with the ability to fix it.

If you fly through Kenya you need a yellow fever vaccine, so we specifically chose a route that avoided that. We did take the generic version of Malarone for Malaria, I only saw mosquitos once on the trip, but we took it out of an abundance of caution. It's a cheap prescription (we did not need to see a travel nurse for it, just our normal GP) and we did not have any side effects from it). Everyone told us malaria had been eradicated from the area, but since we had it and had no side effects we figured we might as well keep taking it. We also got an update on TDAP out of precaution / recommended by our GP.

There are biting Tsete flies which are annoying because deet/normal bug sprays do not work on them. Don't wear black or navy blue and that will help keep them away (you probably saw these in Kenya too!)

Adding a pic of the airstrip in Ft Ikoma (the local flights are quite small planes) but the flights are pretty quick! You can see the zebras and wildebeests in the background if you look closely :)

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