10-Day Honeymoon Safari + Zanzibar Escape

A private transfer from Kilimanjaro International brings you to Arusha Coffee Lodge, where your suite sits among the rows of a working coffee estate. Champagne on arrival, a private dining setup for the evening, and a safari briefing with your guide before an early night. The first day of a honeymoon is the one everybody underestimates.

Arusha Coffee Lodge is a good opening because it is quiet. After a wedding and a long flight, an estate with gardens, cool highland air and no obligation to be anywhere is exactly right. Walk the coffee rows in the morning if you are awake early; the plantation is still in full production.

A scenic drive south to Tarangire and an afternoon game drive among the baobabs, where the elephant herds are the largest in northern Tanzania and often come down to the river in the last of the light. The day ends with a private sundowner set up in the bush, and a suite with its own plunge pool.

Tarangire is an unhurried park to start in. The game comes easily, so there is no anxious first-day hunt for something to look at, and the baobabs give the place a strangeness photographs never quite capture. Watching a herd move past a tree that was already old a thousand years ago is a decent way to begin a marriage.

West through the Ngorongoro Highlands, cool and green and cultivated, then down the far side onto the Serengeti plains. There is an afternoon game drive as you arrive, and dinner is served under the stars at your tented camp.

The transition is worth staying awake for. You climb through farmland and forest for hours and then the country simply opens, grass to the horizon in every direction with nothing built on it. Dinner outside afterwards, the camp lit by lamps and the plains completely dark beyond, is the night most couples describe when they get home.

A full day of game drives with a private picnic lunch set up somewhere with a view. There is an optional hot-air balloon safari at sunrise, booked separately: an hour drifting a few metres above the grass as the sun comes up, landing to a champagne breakfast laid out under an acacia.

Take the balloon if the budget stretches. It is expensive and it is worth it: an entirely silent perspective on a landscape you have only seen from a vehicle, with the herds moving beneath you and your own shadow racing across the plains. It is the single most photographed hour of most honeymoons here.

An unhurried morning game drive, then the long climb east and up to the Ngorongoro crater rim, with a private champagne breakfast set up along the way. The afternoon is free on the rim, which mostly means sitting somewhere warm with 260 square kilometres of caldera laid out below you.

Ngorongoro Serena is built into the rim itself, low and stone-clad, with every room facing the crater. At 2,300 metres the evening turns genuinely cold and the fires get lit, which after days on the hot plains is a pleasure rather than a hardship.

An early descent 600 metres to the crater floor for a half-day safari: lion, elephant, buffalo, hyena, flamingos on the lake, and black rhino if the morning is kind. Picnic lunch by the hippo pool, then you climb out and transfer to Manyara airstrip for the flight to Zanzibar and your beach resort.

Doing the crater and the coast on the same day is a strange and rather wonderful piece of geography. You spend the morning watching rhino in a volcanic caldera at altitude and are swimming in the Indian Ocean by evening, which is not a combination many countries can offer.

A private guided walk through Stone Town, the old quarter of Zanzibar City: alleys wide enough for one, carved teak doors studded with brass, the Sultan's Palace, the House of Wonders, and the site of the old slave market. Lunch is local, and the afternoon is a working spice farm.

Stone Town is beautiful and difficult in equal measure. Its architecture is Omani, Persian, Indian and African layered into a single square kilometre by a thousand years of trade, and that trade included the largest slave market in East Africa. A good guide gives you both, which is the only honest way to see it.

A free day at the resort: swim, snorkel from the beach, read, sleep. In the late afternoon you board a traditional wooden dhow for a sunset cruise with champagne and canapés, and there is a couples spa treatment in the evening.

The dhow is the boat this coast has used for a thousand years: one triangular sail, a hand-carved hull, and no engine unless the wind gives out entirely. Sailing on one at sunset is the most photographed thing on the island and entirely deserving of it.

A full free day. You can snorkel a reef, take the boat out to Prison Island and its century-old giant tortoises, go deep-sea fishing, or do absolutely nothing at all, which, after eight days of early starts, is the option most people take. Dinner is served privately on the beach.

Knowing when to stop planning is the trick to a good honeymoon. By this point you have crossed the country, seen the crater and the Serengeti and Stone Town, and the most valuable thing left on the itinerary is an empty day with a warm sea in front of it.

A final breakfast on the beach with nothing to rush for, then the transfer to Zanzibar International for your flight home.

Ten days covering Tarangire, the Serengeti, the Ngorongoro Crater and the Zanzibar coast is close to the ideal shape for a Tanzanian honeymoon. The safari gives you the days you will talk about; the island gives you the rest you actually need afterwards. Doing them in that order is the whole trick.