This is part of Travel Firsts, a series featuring trips that required a leap of faith or marked a major life milestone. All listings featured on Condé Nast Traveler are independently selected by our editors. If you book something through our links, we may earn an affiliate commission.
“I can’t decide if you’re brave or just nuts.”
The woman saying this to me is a stranger, but she’s been watching me wrestle my 20-month-old son for the last 15 minutes. We’re at TAASA Lodge, a small, luxury bush camp in a 15,000-acre concession near Serengeti National Park in Tanzania. The day started out well enough, but now Julian is sobbing uncontrollably and I’m pretty sure his tantrum has scared off every animal within a 50-mile radius. “This is why people don’t bring toddlers on safari,” I grouse to myself while packing up our lunch; we’ll be eating in the room—again.
It wasn’t like I hadn’t been warned. When I first told friends and family about my cockamamie plan to take Julian on safari, the balking was universal: Anyone who has ever met a buck-wild toddler knows that running errands at Target is harrowing enough, let alone dragging the kid halfway across the globe to see animals he could just as easily ignore at the local zoo. There were disrupted sleep schedules to worry about, not to mention immunizations, and the introduction of new foods. Plus, what if his shrill cries or unpredictable movements spooked a pack of lions or somehow set off an elephant stampede that flipped our SUV?
My more adventurous friends simply questioned whether Julian was too young to appreciate or remember what he saw. Even my husband, who is used to my rose-colored idealism, was skeptical. “You have fun with your stunt journalism,” he snorted when I told him about my plan. “I’ll be home, enjoying the silence.”
The more the hardballs were lobbed my way, the more defiant I became. This was my fifth safari, but my first time bringing a toddler, and I was determined to prove to all the naysayers (and myself) that you don’t have to give up traveling after having a baby. You just have to find new ways to move through the world. That said, I needed all the help I could get.
Go2Africa, a seasoned trip-planning company that specializes in East and Southern Africa safaris, connected me with its Cape Town-based managing director Maija de Rijk-Uys and Condé Nast Top Travel Specialist Ashley Gerrand to talk through my options. Both are working moms who live in Africa and travel extensively with their kids, some as young as Julian. After gauging my risk tolerance (Was I comfortable traveling to a malaria zone? How about staying in an unfenced camp?), G2A cobbled together a toddler-centric itinerary for Tanzania, a country I selected over more-established safari networks in Kenya and South Africa because I wanted to go somewhere I’d never been before. Many camps don’t allow kids under five—or any kids, period—so it was invaluable hearing the moms’ takes on which properties are truly welcoming of families and which ones merely tolerate them. It was also their idea to unwind with a few beach days in Zanzibar post-safari.
