3. Two-week safari every 20 minutes

As mentioned above, Show is one of Disney’s Four Keys to Guest Service. Kilimanjaro Safaris is themed as a two-week African safari. Cast Members often play with the guests waiting in line, asking them if they packed enough clothing or food for the full two weeks. In reality, the ride circuit takes approximately 20 minutes to complete. Yet Disney does a masterful job of packing most of the essential elements of a full two-week safari into that time period.

Most people consider an African safari a once-in-a-lifetime adventure. Only Kilimanjaro Safaris guides are lucky enough to take a two-week safari every 20 minutes. With an average of four hours per day on trucks, that means a typical Kilimanjaro Safaris guide experiences 60 safaris per week, 240 safaris per month, or nearly 3,000 safaris per year. That’s a lot of animal spotting!

4. Speaking Swahili

Kilimanjaro Safaris guides must speak a few words of Swahili.

According to the ride’s back story, the safari takes place in the Harambe Wildlife Reserve, an animal sanctuary in East Africa. Each Cast Member is free to develop his or her own character and reason for coming to Africa, but all are expected to be a part of life on the reserve. This includes speaking some of the local language, Swahili.

While the tours are given in English, keep an ear out for “jambo,” “kwaherini,” “asante” and other Swahili words. The guides are excellent at throwing them casually into an otherwise English-language conversation, so listen carefully or you might miss them altogether!

5. Driving over pucks

Your guide must accurately drive over a series of buried pucks to trigger the ride's audio track.

Unlike Jungle Cruise boats and Great Movie Ride vehicles, Kilimanjaro Safaris trucks are not on a track. They are free-moving vehicles driven by the guides. At various points during each safari, an audio loop complements your guided tour. Yet you now know that the length of the safari varies depending on animal stops. How on earth does the audio play at the right time, no matter how long an individual safari lasts?

The answer is buried deep beneath the ground. At various points along the route, your Kilimanjaro Safaris guide must be careful to drive over a series of pucks, which trigger the various audio effects. If the guide misses a puck, he or she must figure out a way to cover for the missing audio and get the storyline back on track.

Although missing a puck during the tour feels awkward, it is not as bad as missing the initial puck on the way out of the parking lot. At night, the Safari trucks are stored in a massive parking area two miles from the attraction. The perimeter road around Animal Kingdom is traveled by a wide variety of vehicles, most of which are driven at normal speeds. For safety, the Safari trucks are governed at eight miles per hour. But if you hit the parking lot puck just right, you can drive the perimeter road at a relatively speedy 20 mph.

The next time you are stuck in traffic on your way to work, be glad you are not trapped behind a Safari guide who missed the puck! It is amazing how long that two-mile drive of shame can feel when traffic is stacked up behind you.

6. Parking spotters

At night, these 45-foot trucks must park canopy to canopy.

At night, the trucks are parked tightly together, literally canopy to canopy. At roughly 45 feet long, with a passenger capacity of nearly 40 guests, the massive trucks are tricky to drive in reverse. For safety reasons, parking a truck at night looks a lot like a strange ceremonial ritual. The guide must first stop at the propane filling station, and then make his or her way to a crowd of team leaders and managers standing in the parking lot. The group encircles the truck and gives exact directions on which way to turn the wheel, how far to go and precisely when to stop. Don’t you wish you had that kind of help when trying to parallel park in a crowded city on a Saturday night?