Data for Kilimanjaro, the Serengeti, Ngorongoro and Zanzibar, installed before you fly. Tanzania is on the Africa plan with Kenya, so a safari that starts in the Mara and ends on a Zanzibar beach runs on one eSIM. Only the wildebeest cross that border more often.
The Tanzania plan covers Tanzania only.
The same 5 GB in a package that keeps working past Tanzania.
32 other countries share the package with Tanzania. A few of them:
What's included, when it starts, and how to get connected.
Most first trips follow the same arc: land near Kilimanjaro, drive the northern parks, then fly to Zanzibar and do very little. Distances are long and small planes do a lot of the work. The line below is an illustration, not a map.
1Land at Kilimanjaro International, between Moshi and Arusha; climbers add a week on the mountain first. Arusha is where safaris start, and Tarangire, under two hours away on a paved road, is baobabs and elephants, with the biggest herds in the dry months from June to November.
2Half a day on the floor of the Ngorongoro crater, where each vehicle pays its own fee to go down, then the long drive onto the plains. The month decides where to be: calving in the south from about January to March, when some 500,000 calves arrive within a few weeks, and the river crossings in the north from July.
3A short flight from Arusha or a Serengeti airstrip, or the ferry from Dar es Salaam, with passports out again on arrival. A night or two in Stone Town, then the east coast, where the tide goes out a long way twice a day. Buy the island’s visitor insurance before you fly.
How the plan fits this route
One package from the first airport to the last beach: the same allowance in Arusha, at the lodges and on Zanzibar. Away from the main areas the parks are offline for long stretches on any network, so download maps and bookings in Arusha. Kenya is on the same plan, so a trip that starts in Nairobi or ends in the Mara needs nothing else.
Most visitors need a visa: US$50 on visa.immigration.go.tz, or US$100 for the one-year multiple-entry visa US citizens must buy; visas on arrival still exist. Zanzibar has required its own US$44 visitor insurance since October 2024, scanned on arrival. From 1 October 2026 the mainland wants a US$44 policy too, from its national insurer. Doing both? Check whether one policy covers the whole trip.
Since March 2025 the Bank of Tanzania has required prices to be quoted and paid in Tanzanian shillings, and it tells visitors to change money at banks and bureaux or to pay by card; refusing shillings is an offence. The exception visitors meet most is the parks: their fees are still set in dollars and paid electronically, by card or mobile money.
At 5,895 metres it is Africa’s highest mountain and the world’s tallest free-standing one, and the standard routes are a long, steep walk rather than a climb. The thin air is what turns people back: in a study of 1,237 hikers, taking more days predicted reaching the top. The record from gate to summit is under five hours. Go pole pole, slowly, and take seven days.
Farrokh Bulsara was born in Zanzibar on 5 September 1946, went to boarding school in India at eight and came back to the island as a teenager, before his family moved to England in 1964. A small museum now fills a Stone Town house the family once lived in. In 2024 a 110 km crater on the planet Mercury was named Bulsara.
The restaurant on a rock off Michamvi Pingwe has been open since 2011 and books like a concert: a US$10 deposit per person, two-hour sittings, and a table that goes to the queue ten minutes after your slot. You walk across the sand at low tide and take the boat at high tide. Go for the setting; for dinner, Forodhani Gardens in Stone Town grills seafood every evening.
Answers about data, coverage and setup for Tanzania.
Sometimes, and never enough to plan around. The signal comes and goes with the route, the altitude and the weather, and summit night is not the time to rely on it. Keep the phone in an inside pocket, since cold drains batteries fast, and carry a power bank. The package’s days keep counting while you climb, so buy a length that covers the whole trip.
Yes. Zanzibar is part of Tanzania and on the same package, from Stone Town to the beaches of the east coast. Passports come out again when you arrive from the mainland, and the island’s insurance is checked at the port and the airport, but the eSIM does not notice: nothing restarts. As on the mainland, the signal is best in town and thinner in between.
Yes. Kenya is on the Africa plan with Tanzania, so the Mara after the Serengeti, or Nairobi for the flight home, keeps the same allowance, and the phone picks up a Kenyan network shortly after the border. The two parks are one ecosystem, but visitors cross by road at posts such as Namanga or Isebania–Sirari, or by a short flight. Mozambique, to the south, is not on the plan.
