The Crater & Beyond

Your guide meets you at Kilimanjaro International Airport, runs through the week ahead with you and drives you west to Arusha. It takes about an hour, past banana farms and roadside markets, with Mount Meru ahead of you.

Your guest house is small and quiet, with a garden to sit in. There is nothing planned for the rest of the day, so you can sleep off the flight.

You leave early and climb past the rim of the Ngorongoro Crater, then drop down onto the short-grass plains of the Serengeti. The drive takes about four hours, but your guide will stop for whatever is out there: gazelles, ostriches, Maasai herders with their cattle.

You enter the park at Naabi Hill Gate and game drive north to the Seronera area in the centre of the park. The Seronera River has water all year, so lions, leopards and cheetahs stay close by. You reach your tented camp before dark.

You have one more morning drive in the Serengeti, then head back south and east across the plains. You leave the park at Naabi Hill Gate and climb into the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, where Maasai families graze their cattle next to zebras.

The drive to the crater highlands takes about three hours. Tonight you sleep close to the crater rim. It is high up, at over 2,000 metres, and much colder than the plains, so have a warm jacket ready.

Lake Manyara is only 30 minutes down the hill from Karatu. The park is small, with a thick groundwater forest at the entrance where baboons and blue monkeys play on the road, and open floodplains by the lake where you can see elephants, buffalo, hippos and, in some months, pink flamingos.

The lions here sometimes climb trees, but it doesn’t happen every day. After a picnic lunch and a last game drive, you drive about three hours back to Arusha, where the tour ends.