8 Day Serengeti Migration And Ngorongoro 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 around, 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 stored in their trunks. Dinner at your lodge, with our guide running through the days ahead over the table and checking what you have packed for the crater rim, which gets cold.

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, which surprises people who think Lake Manyara has a monopoly on the habit, and around the Silale Swamp the behaviour 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 long after the plains have burned off, and predator viewing there peaks in September and October. We take a picnic lunch out and work the southern sector properly. Tarangire has recorded over 550 bird species, the longest list of any Tanzanian national park, including dry country specials found almost nowhere else in the country, so birders should keep binoculars to hand throughout the day rather than only at 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 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 in the branches. Beyond it the country opens into floodplain where elephant, buffalo, giraffe and waterbuck graze, and tree climbing lions rest in acacia through the heat. Manyara has recorded around 400 bird species, with flamingos and pelicans on the shallows when water levels suit, and the Hippo Pool in the north is one of the few places you can leave the vehicle. Up to Karatu on the crater highlands for the night, which sits high enough to be genuinely cool once the sun goes down.

The transfer day, 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 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 we reach your camp. Where that camp sits depends entirely on the season and on where the herds are, which is a conversation we will have had with you long before you travel.

Today belongs to the herds. The Great Migration is a continuous circuit driven by rainfall rather than a fixed event, so where we work depends on your dates. From December to March the herds calve on the southern plains around Ndutu, where roughly half a million wildebeest 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, where the crocodiles have grown enormous on an annual delivery. From July to October they work the Mara River in the north around Kogatende. Around 1.5 million wildebeest move with several hundred thousand zebra and gazelle. Nobody can promise a river crossing; we can promise to have you in the right country, with a guide who has been reading these herds all season and knows which banks they have been favouring.

The day that makes this itinerary worth eight days rather than six. Herds gather at a riverbank for hours and then walk away; predators hunt at dawn and sleep by nine. Having a second full day in the same region means you can wait, and waiting is how the good sightings happen. If the migration is quiet we work the resident wildlife instead, 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. 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. 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.

An early game drive while the light is at its best, then east and up towards the crater highlands, game viewing along the way rather than driving straight through. The plains give way to acacia woodland and then 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, the whole caldera opening below you as you come over the lip. The rim sits above 2,200 metres and gets genuinely cold after dark, so the warm layer you packed finally earns its place. Early night, because tomorrow starts before dawn and the descent road opens early.

An early descent, because time on the floor is capped and the first hours are by far 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, formed when a volcano as tall as Kilimanjaro collapsed inward. Roughly 25,000 large animals live inside it year round: lion prides in the open grass, 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, so keep the binoculars up. Flamingos on Lake Magadi, hippo at the Ngoitokitok springs. Up and out by mid afternoon, then the drive down through Karatu and Mto wa Mbu to Arusha or Kilimanjaro, roughly four hours, for your flight.