4 Day Tarangire, Ngorongoro And Lake Manyara 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 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 take you straight in for an afternoon game drive along the river corridor. Elephant are the reason to come, and 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, and elephants gouge them for the moisture stored in the trunks. Dinner at your lodge, with our guide running through the days ahead.

Out early, and today we go further than the day visitors do. 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, which surprises people who think Lake Manyara has a monopoly on it, and around the Silale Swamp in the south the habit is regular. That swamp is the park’s second engine: it soaks up water through the rains and releases it slowly through the dry months, staying green when the plains have burned off, and it is where predator viewing peaks in September and October. We take a picnic lunch out and work south. Tarangire has recorded over 550 bird species, the longest list of any Tanzanian national park, including dry country endemics such as the yellow collared lovebird and ashy starling that are found almost nowhere else in Tanzania.

An early descent, because time on the crater floor is capped and the first hours are 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. It is the largest unbroken caldera in the world, formed when a volcano as tall as Kilimanjaro collapsed inward, and roughly 25,000 large animals live inside it year round. That containment is why the game viewing works: lion prides in the open grass, spotted hyena in large clans, elephant bulls carrying heavy ivory, buffalo, zebra, wildebeest and serval hunting the grass. Ngorongoro also gives the best black rhino odds in East Africa, usually at distance near the Lerai Forest in the early morning. Flamingos gather on Lake Magadi, and hippo lie in the Ngoitokitok springs where you can leave the vehicle.

Down off the rim to Lake Manyara, a park of about 330 square kilometres of which two thirds is the lake itself, sitting beneath the 600 metre Gregory Rift escarpment. The entrance drops you straight 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 the tree climbing lions rest in acacia through the heat. Sightings of those are a genuine possibility rather than a certainty. The 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 the drive back to Arusha or Kilimanjaro, roughly two hours through Mto wa Mbu and the escarpment road, for your onward flight or a final night in town.