3-Day Walking, Canoeing & Meru Foothills Acclimatization

You arrive in Arusha and transfer out to Ngurdoto Mountain Lodge, on the edge of the park in the foothills of Mount Meru. The afternoon is a guided walk to the Tululusia Waterfall through dense forest with colobus monkeys overhead, and the day ends with drinks at the lodge.

Arusha National Park is startlingly overlooked. It is thirty minutes from the city, holds forest, crater, lakes and mountain inside a small area, and (because it has no resident lion), permits the walking and canoeing that are impossible anywhere else on the northern circuit.

A morning canoe safari on the Momella Lakes, at water level among hippo and waterbirds, with flamingos on the shallows when the levels suit them. The afternoon is a drive around the rim of the Ngurdoto Crater, stopping at viewpoints looking down into the forested bowl below.

Ngurdoto is sometimes called Little Ngorongoro, and the comparison is fair in shape if not in scale. It is a collapsed volcanic caldera with a swampy floor grazed by buffalo and warthog, and the rule is that nobody drives down into it. You look from the rim, which keeps the floor genuinely undisturbed.

An early drive to the Mount Meru foothills and a gentle trek up to Miriakamba Hut at 2,500 metres, gaining altitude through montane forest with giraffe often visible on the glades below. From the hut the views take in Kilimanjaro across the plain on a clear day. Then the return to Arusha and your onward transfer.

This day is popular as preparation for something bigger. A walk up to Miriakamba and back is a genuine acclimatisation session before a Kilimanjaro or Meru climb, and it is also simply one of the best day walks in northern Tanzania, with an armed ranger along, because the forest holds buffalo and elephant.