6 Day Tanzania Northern Circuit Safari

Our driver guide meets you at Kilimanjaro International Airport or your Arusha hotel and we head southwest, roughly two hours and 120 kilometres through Maasai country to the Tarangire gate. The park covers about 2,850 square kilometres and the Tarangire River running through it is the only permanent water for a long way in any direction, which is what draws everything in during the dry months. We go straight in for an afternoon game drive along the river corridor. Elephant are the reason to come: in the dry season 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 over a thousand years old, gouged by elephants for the moisture in their trunks. Lions climb trees here too, particularly near the Silale Swamp in the south, which surprises people who think Lake Manyara has a monopoly on the habit.

A morning game drive in Tarangire before we move, working the river while the light is good, then the short drive north to Lake Manyara, only about an hour. The park 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 in the branches. Beyond it the country opens into floodplain with elephant, buffalo, giraffe and waterbuck, and tree climbing lions resting in acacia through the heat, which are a genuine possibility rather than a promise. Manyara has recorded around 400 bird species, with flamingos and pelicans on the shallows when water levels suit. Overnight at Karatu on the crater highlands, which sits high enough to be genuinely cool after dark.

The long transfer, and one of the better road days in Africa. We climb onto the Ngorongoro rim and skirt the caldera, stopping at a viewpoint that gives your first look down into it, then descend onto the plains beyond. About halfway we stop at Oldupai Gorge, more commonly written Olduvai, which cuts through the plains and exposes sediment spanning close to two million years. Excavations here by the Leakeys produced Homo habilis and a long sequence of stone tools that rewrote the story of human evolution, and the museum on the rim covers it properly. Nearby at Laetoli, fossil footprints show hominins walking upright 3.6 million years ago. Then on into the Serengeti, roughly four to five hours in total, with an afternoon game drive as you reach Seronera. The name comes from the Maa word siringet, meaning endless plains, and standing on the short grass south of Naabi Hill you understand why.

A full day working the central Serengeti, which is the park’s year round heart and the reason it delivers in any month. The Seronera river valley holds permanent water, which sustains resident prey and with it resident predators. Lion prides here are large and well established, leopard are found with unusual reliability along the riverine forest, often draped in the big sausage trees, and cheetah work the open ground to the south and east. Granite kopjes rise from the plains, weathered outcrops that hold water in their hollows and act as lookouts and den sites, and lion on a kopje at sunrise is the picture people carry away. The Serengeti covers roughly 14,750 square kilometres and was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1981. Where we drive depends on where the herds are for your dates, and our guide will plan the day around the most recent sightings rather than a fixed route.

An early game drive in the Serengeti while the light is at its best, then we turn east and climb back towards the crater highlands, game viewing along the way rather than driving straight through. The plains give way to acacia woodland and then to the forested slopes of the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, which covers about 8,300 square kilometres and was established in 1959 as a multiple land use area where Maasai pastoralists graze cattle alongside wildlife. You will pass bomas, cattle herds and young herders on the way up, and that coexistence is the point of the place rather than an inconvenience to drive around. We reach the rim in the late afternoon, with the whole caldera opening below you as you come over the lip. It sits above 2,200 metres and gets genuinely cold after dark, so the fleece you packed earns its place. Dinner with the caldera below you, and an early night, because tomorrow starts before dawn.

An early descent, because time on the floor is capped and the first hours are the best. The road drops through forest 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. Roughly 25,000 large animals live inside it year round, and the containment is why it works: lion prides in the open, hyena clans, elephant bulls with heavy ivory, buffalo, zebra, wildebeest and serval hunting the grass. This is also the best black rhino ground in East Africa, usually seen at distance near the Lerai Forest early on, so keep the binoculars up. Flamingos gather on Lake Magadi in the middle of the floor, and hippo lie in the Ngoitokitok springs where there is a picnic site and you can leave the vehicle. Up and out by mid afternoon, then the drive down through Karatu and Mto wa Mbu to Arusha or Kilimanjaro for your flight, roughly four hours.