4-Day Tarangire & Ngorongoro Big Five Mid-Range Safari

Straight from Kilimanjaro International into the bush. Your guide meets you at arrivals and drives south across the Maasai Steppe, and you are in Tarangire by mid-afternoon for the first game drive. Elephants in numbers and baobabs the size of houses make an immediate impression, and by the time you reach Sangaiwe for dinner the flight already feels a long way behind you.

The point of an express itinerary is not to see less, it is to waste less. Skipping the customary first night in Arusha puts you inside a national park within hours of landing, which on a four-day trip amounts to close to a whole extra day of game viewing.

A full day in Tarangire, out early with a picnic lunch, working south along the river where the game concentrates. This park holds one of the densest elephant populations in Tanzania, and in the dry season the herds are enormous. In the late afternoon you leave the park and climb up to Karatu for the night.

Tarangire is also the reliable place on the northern circuit for species you will not easily find elsewhere: greater kudu picking through the scrub, fringe-eared oryx out on the drier ground, and gerenuk standing on their hind legs to browse. Serious birders come here specifically; the park list runs past 550 species.

A deliberately gentle day. Karatu sits in the highland farming country between Manyara and the crater, and this is your chance to see a part of Tanzania that is not a national park. Visit a coffee estate and follow the process from bush to cup, or simply stay put at the lodge and do very little in preparation for a very early start tomorrow.

The highlands around Karatu are volcanic and startlingly fertile: deep red soil, coffee, maize and wheat on every slope, and Iraqw families farming country their ancestors have worked for centuries. At around 1,500 metres it is cool and green, and the contrast with the dry steppe you crossed on day one is complete.

An early descent, 600 metres down the wall to the floor of the world's largest intact caldera, for a half-day safari while the game is at its most active. This is the day the Big Five becomes a realistic proposition in a single morning: lion, elephant, buffalo and black rhino all live down here, with leopard in the Lerai forest for the fortunate. Picnic lunch by the hippo pool, then you climb out and return to Arusha.

Ngorongoro concentrates roughly 25,000 large animals into 260 square kilometres. Nothing needs to migrate because there is permanent water and grazing year-round, which is how four days is enough to leave having seen more than people manage in two weeks elsewhere on the continent.