A Logistics Shout Out: Travel Artistry Africa

Needless to say, we had help when it came to planning our nine-week Africa experience. Unless you’re a pretty intrepid traveler (looking at you, Dave Twerdun!!) most Americans use some kind of consultant when planning Africa travel. Indeed, the only people we met who were road-tripping or camping or doing self-driving safaris were people actually *from* Africa.

At a minimum, you really need someone who can help you book all the bush planes and smaller flights (I think we took nearly 13 flights while were on the continent. That alone would have been a nightmare to try to coordinate on our own, especially since many are charters).

There are a lot of amazing Africa consultants out there. We found Travel Artistry Africa via a travel agent we’ve used in the past, Bobby Zur. TAA’s team is led by South African Tamsyn Fricker, who lives in the states, and her team based in South Africa, including Lauren Alblas and Robyn Du Plooy.

This team did everything right, and we are so grateful.

The process was fun, for anyone curious: We had a call last fall in which Teddy and I described the time we had allotted, the budget and generally what we envisioned for our time in Africa.

I wish I could remember everything on our wishlist, but I know there were things like a road trip in Namibia, a stay at famed luxury safari camp Londolozi (where the Bensfields had spent a memorable week back in 2003), going to Madagascar and finishing somewhere like the Seychelles.

Tamsyn and team were smart, presenting us with a day by day itinerary when we’d only asked for help with a few safaris and a beach stay at the end (we’re going to do alllll the rest on our OWN, we insisted). Their pitch was so compelling — they walked us through each place, with explanations of why they picked it, what we could expect to get out of it, how it checked some of our boxes — that we ended up accepting the itinerary they created, hook line and sinker.

By November of last year, everything was booked.

Part of what they heard from us loud and clear was that we wanted to be really independent and not have lots of sightseeing nor a lot of luxury — Africa’s luxury is insane (as our friend Luke put it, it just keeps going up and up, there’s no limit to how decadent these places can get). We didn’t want the experience to be about fabulous retreats — that’s a different trip — we wanted some luxury mixed in but basically the chance to do things our own way, try living like locals and get some road tripping in.

Their expertise came in handy at every level: They found us a rental house in Cape Town for instance, when we were going to try our blind luck on Airbnb. The place they booked was perfectly suited to us, neighborhood-wise, size-wise, cool-wise. Not sure I would have ever picked it.

They knew we wanted to road trip, and steered us away from Namibia (wait til the kids are older, they said – the distances are long and sparsely populated) and toward the Garden Route, which gave us a surprisingly varied and interesting perspective on South Africa.

They had us try Zimbabwe and Mozambique for incredible safari and beach experiences where our dollar went a lot farther than tried-and-true Botswana safari and Kenyan beaches, whose brands are well established with American tourists (and I’d been to both already!).

As for the rest of our initial ideas, they advised us that Londolozi doesn’t take young kids, Madagascar is a little too “raw” with small kids/the only decent medical aid is on the mainland and the Seychelles are gorgeous but far and pricey when you can get beautiful beach deals closer by.

The cadence of stays was just right. We never felt any place was too short or too long. They wisely always seemed to have us in comfortable digs right after a more rustic stay. And they picked spots that satisfied our desire to have weeks where we could just go to the grocery store and cook at home. A lot of self-catering and self-driving.

When at one point we decided to change a week or two’s worth of fully booked plans (and flights) to make it possible for Lobsy to spend time in Cape Town rather than Joburg, they didn’t bat an eye. Just laid out the new plan and made it happen.

Perhaps the best part of all this was that we had Tamsyn and Lauren on WhatsApp at any point to answer questions, share pics, etc. Having them local and so accessible allowed us to do things and eat at locals-only places (um, Ray’s Kitchen in Salt Rock near Durban) that we might only have visited if we actually lived in these areas.

In other words, we didn’t feel like tourists — a sign of a travel agent’s job very well done, in our book.

So grateful to them and happy to introduce anyone who’d like to try them out.