4-Day Zanzibar to Serengeti Direct Fly-In Safari

A morning scheduled flight from Zanzibar straight to the Seronera airstrip in the central Serengeti. Your private guide meets the aircraft and the first game drive starts immediately. There is no transfer day and no wasted hours. You reach Kati Kati Tented Camp in time to settle before dark.

The change of scene inside a single morning takes some adjusting to. You have breakfast within sight of the Indian Ocean and by mid-afternoon you are watching lion in open grassland eight hundred kilometres inland. It is the most efficient way there is to combine a beach holiday with a serious safari.

A full day working the Seronera Valley: lion prides along the river, leopard in the riverine acacias, and cheetah out on the open ground where they hunt best. Picnic lunch under an acacia, with the drives timed around the heat so you are out when the animals are active.

Kati Kati is a mobile tented camp with no fences and no mains power, pitched in the middle of the park. That matters as much as the game drives: dinner under a lamp, staff walking you back to your tent, and a night of sounds that no lodge with a generator can offer.

A final morning game drive on the way out of the Serengeti, then the drive east and up onto the forested highlands of the Ngorongoro Conservation Area. You gain more than a thousand metres over the course of the day and arrive at Rhino Lodge on the crater rim in the afternoon.

The temperature change is the first thing you notice. You leave the plains in shirtsleeves and arrive at 2,300 metres wanting a fleece, with mist coming through the forest around the lodge. Buffalo and elephant use that forest regularly, which is why guests are escorted to dinner after dark.

An early descent 600 metres to the crater floor for a half-day Big Five safari while the game is most active. Lion, elephant, buffalo and hyena come readily, black rhino are the one to hope for, and flamingos line Lake Magadi. After a picnic lunch by the hippo pool you transfer to Lake Manyara or Arusha airstrip for the direct flight back to Zanzibar.

The fourth day buys you the crater, and the crater is what makes the Big Five a realistic proposition. Around 25,000 large animals live inside a caldera you can drive across in an hour, a density that exists nowhere else on the continent.