7 Days Northern Safari

You are met at Kilimanjaro International Airport and driven to your lodge in Arusha, roughly an hour through coffee farms and small roadside markets.

In the evening your driver-guide runs through the route day by day, checks kit and answers questions, so morning departure is quick and simple.

After breakfast you head southwest to Tarangire, a park defined by ancient baobabs and the river that draws game from a huge area in the dry months.

Tarangire holds some of the largest elephant concentrations in Tanzania. You spend the day on the river circuit with a picnic lunch under the trees, watching for lion in the swamp fringes and tree climbing python in the ficus.

Note: June to October is the strongest window here, as animals concentrate on the river.

A short drive to Lake Manyara, where a groundwater forest of mahogany and fig gives way to open floodplain and a soda lake fringed with flamingo.

This is the park for baboon troops, bushbuck, hippo pools and the occasional tree resting lion. In the afternoon you climb the Rift Valley escarpment to Karatu for a slow evening and an early night.

You cross the Ngorongoro highlands and drop onto the southern Serengeti plains, an open horizon that changes the feel of the trip entirely.

Optional stops at Olduvai Gorge and a Maasai boma break up the drive. From Naabi Hill gate onward the game drive is continuous, arriving in the central Seronera area in the late afternoon.

A full day with no transfers. You leave at first light with breakfast boxes, when predators are still active and the light is best for photography.

The Seronera river valley is one of the most reliable places in Africa for lion and leopard, while the granite kopjes are favoured by cheetah. Depending on the season your guide will push north or south to follow the herds.

Note: A hot air balloon safari can be added on this morning, booked in advance.

One more morning in the Serengeti, following kopje lines and river bends, before turning east across the plains.

You arrive on the Ngorongoro Crater rim in the late afternoon, 2,300m up and often in cloud, with a view down 600m onto the caldera floor you will drive tomorrow.

An early breakfast and a steep descent into the crater, an intact caldera holding around 25,000 large animals in 260 square kilometres.

Lion, elephant bulls, hippo, flamingo on Lake Magadi and, with luck, the endangered black rhino. Picnic lunch beside the hippo pool, then out and back to Arusha for your onward flight.