Walt Disney World Review: Kilimanjaro Safaris

Stars: 5 out of 5
Pros: A decent sized trip through Africa with many of their animals on display

Cons: If the animals aren't out, it won't be very fun.

The Bottom Line:

Ride through Africa

Without leaving Florida

It's the next best thing

A Two Week Tour Through the Harambe Animal Preserve?  Sign Me Up!

Okay, true, on my first trip to Disney World, I wanted to do everything.  But one of my absolute must do's was Kilimanjaro Safaris in the Animal Kingdom park.  It was well worth a visit to the Animal Kingdom all by itself.

I, along with many others, consider this the signature ride of Animal Kingdom.  As a result, the lines can get long quickly.  My friends and I went to the park on the day resort guests got early admission.  We went straight to this ride arriving about half an hour after resort opening and half an hour before the true opening.  We still had a half hour wait.  By the time we got off, the wait was much longer, closer to an hour long.  The good news is this ride employs the Fastpass system which lets you reserve a place in a shorter line during a specific time period.  While I never watched it that closely, my guess is it goes pretty quickly.

The ride is located in the Africa section of the park in the far left corner, almost as far from the main gate as you can get.  The lines weaves you through the offices of a safari company.  When your turn comes, you board large jeeps that seat roughly 30 people.  Then it's off for your two week adventure through the Harambe Animal Preserve.  (So the ride is really only twenty to thirty minutes.  But that's the premise.)

The folks at Disney have done an amazing job with the setting for this ride.  It looks and feels like you really are in the middle of the pride lands of Africa and not the swamp lands of Florida.  There are big fields of grass and small ponds of water.  Okay, so some native Florida wildlife has come all the way to Africa to settle, but my tour guide played that for laughs.

Also amazing is the lack of enclosures.  Oh, I'm sure they are there, but I'll be darned if I could see them.  It looked for all the world like you and the animals were right next to each other.

And the animals!  At times they were coming too fast to see.  The guide attempts to point them out to you as you go, but it can be quite hard.  In fact, this was one of my only frustrations with the ride.  Because some of the animals really can come up to the path, the guide must keep the vehicle moving at all times.  As a result, it gets pretty tricky trying to see everything there is to see.  I tried too hard to get pictures of everything along the way.  I highly recommend you only take one or two pictures and spend the rest of the time just enjoying the experience.

So, what can you expect to see?  I was lucky enough to see okapi, bongos, giraffes, zebras, hippos, warthogs, and lions.  Depending on time of day and animal activity, they do have ostriches (I saw plenty of eggs), rhinos, hippos, and who knows what all else.

Speaking of animal activity, that's another reason why I went on this first thing in the morning.  Rumor has it that the animals are more active earlier in the day.  I was only able to go on the ride once, but I saw lots of animals.

I've mentioned the guide a couple of times.  In truth, he's also our driver.  Unlike any other ride at Disney, this ride doesn't run on a track of any kind.  True, there's an obvious path that the jeep follows, but your driver determines how fast or slow you go.

As the ride progresses, we learn via the radio that poachers have been spotted in the park.  They are trying to find the new baby elephant.  We are asked to keep our eyes open and the ride ends with a chase to capture them.  This aspect of the ride is a little cheesy and you honestly don't need it.  But it's a mild irritant.  As I mentioned, the ride itself is around 20 minutes long and this part takes up two or three minutes.

Really, the ride is a four wheel drive type of experience.  It can get a tad, um, bumpy.  But I only think it would be a problem for someone with severe pain.  Again, the bumps don't last too long.

Probably my biggest regret about my week at Disney World is that I didn't make the time to ride Kilimanjaro Safaris a second time.  This attraction is more like something from the San Diego Wild Animal Park than a Disney theme park.  And in this case, that isn't a bad thing at all.