Wild Africa Trek Review
One of the most exciting tours in Disney World is the Wild Africa Trek! This is one of a handful of tours at Disney’s Animal Kingdom, and is definitely our favorite tour of the bunch, and we even did it in the pouring rain and still loved it!
On this tour you get suited up in a harness that not only lets you cross some rickety looking rope bridges, but also lets you get close to both the hippos and crocodiles while you stand close to the ledge of both the enclosures. You also get a vest with tons of pockets and places to attach items you wish to bring with you on the tour.
The day we did it, we opted to do the earliest one of the day, which these days is 8:45 AM. As mentioned earlier, it was absolutely pouring this day, but lucky for us there was no lightning, so the tour still went on as scheduled! So be prepared to do this tour even in the rain, and you will get drenched since you’re exposed to the elements for most of it.
Upon checking in we got our vest and harness on, and anything we couldn’t attach to our vest got put into the available lockers at the check-in. We also received the tour water bottles at that point which we got to fill up, and connect to our vest, before we headed out.
This is a small tour, when we went there were only 11 of us guests and three cast member guides. One of the nicest things is one of the cast members main job is to take pictures of the group throughout the tour, so we not only did we get some great pictures, but for those of us who forgot to charge their camera battery it saved the day!
To start the tour we took a walk “backstage” through a path in the woods, although since there was nothing to see in that area the cast members did let us photograph if we wanted.
One of the backstage trails on Wild Africa Trek
The path was uneven and there were tree roots to watch out for, so you do have to be a bit careful walking this way, but it wasn’t a super long walk to hit our first destination, the hippo pool!
Here they have rails with attachments that connected to our harnesses so we could get up close to the ledge to really get a good, and surprisingly close, view of the hippos!
They brought some lettuce with them to feed the hippos to draw them over to us, and so we could see their mouth, which are just wild looking!
We spent a good amount of time here, with the cast members providing a lot of information about the hippos, and also getting lots of pictures!
Next we moved on to the bridges! There were two bridges to cross, and they went over the crocodiles, guess they’re trying to up the fear factor!
These weren’t too bad to cross, but there were some planks that were rather far apart, and I have long legs so I imagine someone with shorter legs might have a bit more trouble. You are connected to a safety line though so no worries if you lose your footing, and there is a net under the bridge in case anything falls off your vest.
The cast members spaced us out from each other on the bridges really well to get great shots of each of us individually!
The bridge in the background, and the rail we connected our harness to at the crocodile overlook.
When we had all arrived to terra firma after the last bridge we made our way over to the next overlook at the crocodile enclosure!
Again, the cast members spent a lot of time providing information about the crocodiles, and of course taking pictures.
Finally, it was time to remove the harness and the vest, hop into a special safari truck, and make our way out onto the savanna.
This was a different truck than the safari vehicles, instead of rows of seats it had benches along the sides, but fortunately it had a roof! We all piled in, happy to get out of the rain for a bit.
We took the normal safari route out into the savanna, but once out there pulled off to the side to sit and watch the animals for sometime, and for the cast members to give us more information about the animals on the safari.
We got very lucky and ended up having a curious giraffe come over and visit us while we were sitting there, it got so close we could have touched it!
After sitting out on the savanna for a while, it was time to move on to our lunch. For this, we drove further along the safari route until we took a detour up to the boma! You may have seen this building while on the safari, you can see it just as you’re leaving the savanna, and the turnoff to it is right by the flamingo pond.
We made our way up there and found our table, already set with the tiffins of food!
The food was incredibly good, there were multiple layers to the tiffin, each with different small containers of items to eat.
There were also restrooms at this location if needed.
We had a decent amount of time to enjoy the food here and the views. There is a back boardwalk that looks out over the lions which is really cool to see as well!
Once we wrapped up with the lunch, we piled back into the truck, and made our way back to the check-in area to end the tour.
This was such a fun and amazing tour, we loved every minute of it, even with all the rain! I 100% recommend and cannot wait to do it again!
