10 Day Tanzania Northern Circuit Fly-In Safari

Our driver guide meets your flight at Kilimanjaro International Airport and takes you the short distance to Arusha, which sits at around 1,400 metres beneath Mount Meru and is considerably pleasanter than a five hour drive after a long haul. The afternoon is yours. If you land early we can fill it usefully: the Arusha Declaration Museum and the cultural heritage centre both give useful context for the country you are about to travel through, and the coffee estates on the lower slopes of Meru run plantation visits. Otherwise, sleep off the flight. Our guide will run through the ten days with you over dinner, go through the early starts and check your kit, particularly binoculars, warm layers for the crater rim and dust protection for camera gear. Tomorrow the safari begins properly, and from here on the days start early, so an unhurried first evening is time well spent.

Southwest through Maasai country, roughly two hours and 120 kilometres to the Tarangire gate. The park covers about 2,850 square kilometres and the Tarangire River running north to south through it is the only permanent water for a long way in any direction, which is what makes the dry season here so strong. We go straight in for an afternoon game drive along the river corridor. Elephant are the reason to come: in the dry months herds of 100 to 300 animals gather on the banks, with as many as three thousand converging on the park. Baobabs stand across the grassland, some estimated at over a thousand years old, gouged by elephants for the moisture stored in their trunks. Local tradition says the gods pulled them up and planted them upside down, which is as good an explanation as any once you have seen one against the sky. Dinner at your lodge inside the park.

Out early and further south than the day visitors reach. The northern river corridor gives you the concentration, with zebra, wildebeest, buffalo, impala, giraffe, eland and hartebeest all using the water alongside the elephants, and lion following them. Lions climb trees here, particularly around the Silale Swamp in the south, which is the park’s second engine: it soaks up water through the rains and releases it slowly through the dry months, staying green long after the plains have burned off. Predator viewing there peaks in September and October. We take a picnic lunch out and work the swamp properly, which is where most day visitors never reach. Tarangire has recorded over 550 bird species, the longest list of any Tanzanian national park, with dry country specials such as the yellow collared lovebird and ashy starling found almost nowhere else in the country. Birders should keep binoculars to hand all day rather than only around the swamp.

A short drive north to Lake Manyara, only about an hour, and a completely different park. Manyara covers roughly 330 square kilometres, two thirds of which is the lake, sitting beneath the 600 metre Gregory Rift escarpment. The entrance drops you into groundwater forest, mahogany and fig fed by springs rather than rainfall, with troops of olive baboon sometimes over a hundred strong and blue monkeys overhead. Beyond it the country opens into floodplain where elephant, buffalo, giraffe and waterbuck graze, and tree climbing lions rest in acacia through the heat. Around 400 bird species have been recorded, with flamingos and pelicans on the shallows when levels suit. The treetop canopy walkway, the first of its kind in Tanzania, runs through the forest at treetop height on suspended bridges and takes about ninety minutes including the walk in. Then up to Karatu on the crater highlands for the night, ready for an early descent tomorrow.

An early descent, because time on the floor is capped and the first hours are by far the best. The road drops through forest on the rim and opens onto a bowl 19 kilometres across with walls rising some 610 metres and a floor of about 260 square kilometres, the largest unbroken caldera in the world, formed when a volcano as tall as Kilimanjaro collapsed inward. Roughly 25,000 large animals live inside it year round, and that containment is why the viewing works: lion prides in the open, hyena clans, elephant bulls with heavy ivory, buffalo, zebra, wildebeest and serval hunting the grass. This is the best black rhino ground in East Africa, usually at distance near the Lerai Forest early on. Flamingos on Lake Magadi, hippo at the Ngoitokitok springs. Back up to Karatu for the night, and pack tonight for the flight tomorrow, since light aircraft carry strict luggage limits, usually around fifteen kilograms in a soft bag with no rigid frame.

This is where the itinerary earns its shape. Rather than spending most of a day driving to the Serengeti, we transfer you to the airstrip for a light aircraft flight straight into the region where the herds should be for your dates. The flight takes roughly an hour depending on the destination, against four to five hours by road to Seronera and considerably longer to the north or west. You land at a bush strip, your camp meets the plane, and you are on a game drive by early afternoon. The Serengeti covers roughly 14,750 square kilometres and was listed by UNESCO in 1981. The name comes from the Maa word siringet, meaning endless plains, and the view from the air on the way in explains it better than any description does. Camp meets the plane at the strip and you are game viewing by early afternoon rather than arriving worn out at dusk.

The Great Migration is a continuous circuit driven by rainfall rather than a fixed event, so where we work depends entirely on your dates. From December to March the herds calve on the southern plains around Ndutu, where roughly half a million calves are born within a few weeks, as many as eight thousand a day at the peak, and every predator in the region converges. From around May to July they mass in the Western Corridor and cross the Grumeti. From July to October they work the Mara River in the north around Kogatende and Lamai. Around 1.5 million wildebeest move with several hundred thousand zebra and Thomson’s gazelle moving alongside them. Nobody can promise a river crossing, since herds gather for hours and then walk away, but four nights in the right region gives you the time to wait properly, which is what separates a good migration trip from a lucky one.

Time is the whole point of a four night stay, and today is where it pays. If the herds are active we stay with them; if they are quiet we work the resident wildlife, which is exceptional in its own right. The Seronera river valley holds permanent water and with it resident prides, leopard along the riverine forest often draped in the big sausage trees, and cheetah on the open ground to the south and east. Granite kopjes rise from the plains, weathered outcrops that hold rainwater in their hollows and serve as lookouts and den sites, and lion on a kopje at sunrise is the picture people carry away from this park. A hot air balloon flight is worth arranging in advance for one of these mornings. It launches before dawn, drifts low over the plains where the wind allows, and finishes with a bush breakfast cooked in the open.

The flexible day, and the reason this trip exists in this shape. If the herds have shifted while you have been here, which happens, we can move you between Serengeti regions by light aircraft rather than losing a day to the road, since Seronera to Kogatende in the north takes most of a day to drive and under an hour to fly. If the herds are where they were, we spend the day working them properly, or head out to the quieter eastern plains towards the Gol Mountains where visitor numbers are very low and researchers work on cheetah. Walking safaris with armed rangers are available in designated areas of the park and on the private concessions bordering it, along with night drives, both of which show you a completely different Serengeti from the one you see through a windscreen. Either needs arranging in advance rather than on the day.

One last game drive at dawn, when the light is at its best and the predators are still moving, then back to camp for breakfast and a shower before the transfer to the airstrip. The flight to Kilimanjaro or Arusha takes roughly an hour and a half depending on where in the park you have been, and it gives you a final look at the plains from above, which is the right way to leave the Serengeti, with the herds and the kopjes shrinking beneath you. We connect you to your international departure, or into Arusha for a final night if your flight is the following day. If you are continuing to Zanzibar rather than flying home, the same flight routes through Arusha and we will arrange the connection so you go straight from the plains to the coast. Most people take a day or two to stop moving after this trip.