5-Day Tarangire, Ngorongoro, Serengeti – Mid-Range

We will pick you up from the airport/Arusha by our driver/guide and drive you to Tarangire for a full-day game drive. You will spend overnight at the lodge/camp.

The destination is slightly off the main safari route; Tarangire National Park is a lovely quiet park in Northern Tanzania that is most famous for its elephant migration, birding, and quiet authentic safari atmosphere. The majority of travelers to the region either miss out on Tarangire altogether or venture into the park for a matter of hours leaving parts of Tarangire virtually untouched.

You will have breakfast at the camp and then depart after breakfast for Serengeti National Park via the Ndutu area, where you will see the great migration.

Serengeti is the oldest and most popular national park, also a world heritage site and recently proclaimed a 7th Worldwide
Wonder. The Serengeti is famed for its annual migration, when some six million hooves pound the open plains, as more than 200,000 zebra and 300,000 Thomson gazelles join the wildebeest’s trek for fresh grazing. Yet even when the migration is quiet, the Serengeti offers arguably the most scintillating game-viewing in Africa: great herds of buffalo, smaller groups of elephant and giraffe, and thousands upon thousands of eland, topi, kongoni, impala, and Grant’s gazelle.

After breakfast, you will proceed to a full-day game drive in Central Serengeti, home of big cats, lions, leopards, and cheetahs. You will have a picnic lunch and in the evening we go back to the camp for an evening campfire, shower, and overnight stay.

A million wildebeest… each one driven by the same ancient rhythm, fulfilling its instinctive role in the inescapable the cycle of life: a frenzied three-week bout of territorial conquests and mating; survival of the fittest as 40km (25 miles) long columns plunge through crocodile-infested waters on the annual exodus north; replenishing the species in a brief the population explosion that produces more than 8,000 calves daily before the 1,000 km (600 miles) pilgrimage begins again.

After breakfast, we depart Serengeti and drive to Ngorongoro for a game drive at the Ngorongoro crater. Late in the afternoon, we drive back to the lodge.

The jewel in Ngorongoro’s crown is a deep, volcanic crater, the largest unflooded and unbroken caldera in the world. About 20kms across, 600 meters deep, and 300 sq km in area, the Ngorongoro Crater is a breathtaking natural wonder. We will visit Lake Magadi, a large but shallow alkaline lake in the southwestern corner, which is one of the main features of the crater. A large number of flamingos, hippos, and other water birds can usually be seen here.

We depart for a morning game drive at Lake Manyara National Park with a picnic lunch. In the evening, we drive to Arusha to drop you off at your hotel in Arusha booked by your own arrangements.

Manyara provides the perfect introduction to Tanzania’s birdlife. More than 400 species have been recorded, and even a first-time visitor to Africa might reasonably expect to observe 100 of these in one day. Inland of the floodplain, a narrow belt of acacia woodland is the favored haunt of Manyara’s legendary tree-climbing lions and impressively tusked elephants.