Zicasso Travel Stories: The Trip Where He Let Go of the Wheel

The person on the other end of that follow-up call was Andre, a Zicasso specialist. Rather than presenting a ready-made itinerary, he opened by asking what the family wanted out of the trip and why. It took several long calls after that, working through the budget and the family's priorities, before Tanzania became a real itinerary instead of a search result.

"It takes a lot for me to hand my travel planning to someone else," Mark said. "I've backpacked through Europe and Africa, and figured it out as I went. But from that first conversation with Andre, I felt like I could let go because he clearly knew the place and he was building this around my family, not just selling me a country."

Even with his questions for Andre answered, Mark and his wife carried one worry they could not fully talk themselves out of: would the girls really enjoy any of this? A safari means long days in a vehicle, the kind of stretch that can wear thin fast for a 10-year-old. Could a safari planned specifically for a family help ease their anxieties?

Getting to Tanzania asked a great deal of two young travelers before the trip had even started. The family flew to New York first, stayed several days with Mark's brother-in-law, then continued on: New York to Zurich, a long layover, Zurich to Addis Ababa, another long layover, and finally into Kilimanjaro. By the time they landed, they had been in transit for nearly 36 hours.

Then they walked into the terminal, and a guide was standing there with their last name on a sign.

"Seeing our name on that sign," Mark said. "That was the sigh of relief."

The next day, Mark's 13-year-old told him the flights had been worth it.

The family moved through four camps during the safari: Tarangire, the Ngorongoro Crater, Lake Eyasi, and the Serengeti. Photos online had given Mark some sense of what a tented camp might feel like. None of it matched the night in the Serengeti when the family woke to a sound just outside the canvas.

"We heard this noise in the middle of the night, loud, close," Mark said. "It was a herd of elephants. They had surrounded the tent and were eating right outside it. Terrifying and awe-inspiring at the same time. My kids still talk about it. We could have reached out and touched them if we wanted to."

Before the trip, Mark told Andre what he did not want: a safari that kept his family behind lodge walls, disconnected from the place itself. Andre built in a visit with the Hadzabe, a hunter-gatherer community, where both girls went out with bows and arrows alongside members of the tribe, learning to track and, eventually, to hunt birds for the day's fire. What stayed with Mark was not the hunt itself, but what came after. Each night, the family sat together and talked through what they had seen: how differently that family organized itself day to day, how they moved as a group, what the girls had noticed that the adults hadn't. A 10-year-old, a 13-year-old, and two adults, processing the same day in four different ways.

The clearest test of how much Mark had let go came on a transfer day, when the safari vehicle blew a gasket on the climb toward a coffee plantation.

"If I had been driving, that day would have fallen apart," Mark said. "It would have been a disaster."

Instead, the guide dropped the family at the plantation and worked the problem from there. What was supposed to be a short stop before lunch elsewhere became four or five hours among the coffee rows. The family knew the vehicle had broken down. They just never had to solve it. By the time a replacement arrived, nobody was in a hurry to leave.

That part of the trip did not go as planned, but Mark was not the one who had to fix it.

The trip closed in Zanzibar, in a rented house rather than another lodge, a deliberate change of pace after the early mornings and long drives of the safari. On one of the last nights, Mark's wife pulled up a set of questions to ask the family about the trip, wanting to hear what had stuck with each of them beyond the obvious answer of everything being good.

The four answers barely overlapped. Sitting there listening, Mark realized that being together every day hadn't meant experiencing the same trip.

For him, it was the time with the Hadzabe, seeing firsthand how differently another family could organize its days and watching his daughters take that in.

What he noticed was how little he thought about the next day. On his own trips, dinner is usually followed by an hour of sorting out tomorrow: transportation, timing, what could go wrong. In Tanzania, dinner was just dinner. He slept without running through the next day's logistics, because there was nothing left for him to solve.

His wife put it more plainly than he could.

Mark has crossed seven continents. This was the one he did not drive.

If a family safari in Tanzania is on your mind, our specialists start the same way Andre did: by asking what your family needs and what your family wants.

Find inspiration with our Tanzania safari vacations or explore our Africa travel guide.