5-Day Zanzibar, Arusha & Serengeti Fly-In Safari

A flight from Zanzibar to Arusha, where our representative meets you and transfers you to Outpost Lodge. The evening is deliberately unstructured: gardens, a pool, a safari briefing and dinner, with no early start to worry about.

Building in a night in Arusha changes the shape of the trip. Rather than arriving in the Serengeti already tired from travelling, you break the journey, meet your guide properly, and start the safari fresh the following morning. On a five-day itinerary that first evening is worth more than the hour of game viewing it costs.

After breakfast you transfer to Arusha Airport for a scheduled flight to the Seronera airstrip, an hour or so in the air with the Rift Valley and the Ngorongoro highlands passing below. Your private guide meets you on arrival and the first game drive begins straight from the strip. You settle into Kati Kati Tented Camp.

Flying rather than driving saves the best part of a day in each direction. The road from Arusha to Seronera is eight hours of hard travelling; the flight is under ninety minutes, and on a short itinerary that difference is the difference between two full days in the park and one.

A full day in the Seronera Valley with a picnic lunch in the bush, focused on the big cats and the elephant herds, and on the migration if the herds happen to be in the area. Two drives split around the middle of the day, when the cats push into shade and very little moves.

Seronera holds resident game year-round because of its permanent river, so the day is productive regardless of where the migration has got to. Your guide will be working the radio, reading tracks and watching where the vultures are turning. Most good sightings are found rather than stumbled upon.

A morning game drive as you leave the Serengeti, then the long climb east onto the volcanic highlands of the Ngorongoro Conservation Area. You arrive at Rhino Lodge on the crater rim with the afternoon free to sit with the view down into the caldera.

That view is the reason to arrive with time in hand. The crater floor is 600 metres below you and roughly 260 square kilometres across, and in the late afternoon cloud spills over the far rim and pools inside it. It is one of the great sights in Africa and deserves more than a glance on the way to dinner.

An early descent to the crater floor for a half-day Big Five safari, timed to get you down there while the animals are active and before the vehicles build up. Picnic lunch by the hippo pool, then you climb out and drive back to Arusha for your transfer to Kilimanjaro International.

The crater is a fitting close because it works so differently from the Serengeti. Where the plains are about space and patience, the crater is about concentration: everything inside a walled bowl with permanent water and grazing, so nothing has any reason to leave. Five days covering both gives you a proper picture of northern Tanzania.