Meet the River

Your driver-guide meets you at Kilimanjaro International Airport and gives you a short briefing on the week ahead. Then it is about an hour’s drive west to Arusha, with Mount Meru ahead of you and, on a clear day, Kilimanjaro behind.

Your first night is at a small guest house outside town. Have an early dinner and a good sleep. Tomorrow starts after breakfast.

After breakfast you drive up past the Ngorongoro Crater rim and down onto the short-grass plains. It is about four hours to the central Serengeti, and you game-drive most of the way, stopping at the Naabi Hill gate for the park entry.

The Seronera area has water all year, so lions, leopards and cheetahs stay here even when the herds have gone north. Your guide will check the granite kopjes for lions and the sausage trees along the river for a resting leopard.

This is a full day by the Mara River. The herds gather on the banks, sometimes for hours, before one animal goes in and the rest follow. Crocodiles wait in the brown water, and lions and hyenas watch from the grass.

Your guide knows the crossing points and talks with other guides by radio, so you move to where the herds are building up. You take a picnic lunch, so you do not have to leave the river in the middle of the day.

You leave early and drive about three hours to the Ngorongoro Crater, then down the steep road to the floor. The crater is about 20 km across, with grassland, a soda lake, swamps and a small forest, and the animals do not need to leave.

Look for lion, buffalo, elephant bulls with long tusks and, if you are lucky, a black rhino in the open grass. You eat a picnic lunch by the hippo pool, then climb out and drive about 30 minutes to Karatu.