On the Plains

When you land at Kilimanjaro International Airport, your guide is there to meet you. You’ll have a short chat about the week, then drive about an hour to Arusha, the busy safari town under Mount Meru.

Your first night is at a friendly guest house or a villa on a coffee farm. Have a shower, get some sleep and be ready for an early breakfast.

After breakfast you drive up through the misty forest on the edge of the Ngorongoro Crater, then down into open Maasai grazing land, with herders in red and blue cloth walking beside their cattle.

Past Naabi Hill gate you are in the Serengeti. The drive to the central plains takes about four hours, but you game-drive most of it, stopping for gazelles, hyenas, jackals and whatever else is out there. You stop for lunch on the way and reach your tented camp in the afternoon.

With a second full day you can go further. Depending on the season, your guide may take you to the Moru kopjes, great granite domes in the south-west of the central plains, or east to the Gol and Simba kopjes, where cheetahs and lions use the rocks as lookouts.

If the wildebeest and zebra herds are within reach of camp, this is the day to go and find them. You take a picnic lunch and stay out as long as you like, then return to the same camp for your third night.

A short drive down the escarpment brings you to Lake Manyara National Park. The first part of the park is a green groundwater forest where baboons sit in the road and blue monkeys watch from the branches. Beyond it, the floodplain opens up to the lake shore.

Hippos, pelicans and, in some months, flamingos gather on the water, with the Rift Valley wall rising behind. After a picnic lunch in the park you drive about three hours back to Arusha, where the tour ends.