8-Day Northern Wilderness & Zanzibar Honeymoon

You arrive in Arusha and transfer south to Elewana Tarangire Treetops, checking into a treehouse suite built up among ancient baobab and marula trees. The rooms are enormous and open to the air on one side, and the evening is sundowners on your private deck looking down at the waterhole.

Treetops is one of the more unusual places to stay in Tanzania. The suites sit several metres off the ground in the canopy, which means elephant walk underneath you at night, and the waterhole in front of camp brings game in throughout the day without you having to go anywhere at all.

A full day exploring Tarangire's elephant country and baobab landscapes, with a romantic bush picnic set up at lunch and a sundowner as the light drops. The park has the densest elephant population in northern Tanzania, and in the dry months the herds along the river are extraordinary.

The baobabs are what people remember. Some are more than a thousand years old, storing tens of thousands of litres of water in their trunks to survive the dry season, and elephants gouge at the bark to get at it. A tree with tusk scars in it is a fair summary of how this park works.

A morning departure west, climbing through the Ngorongoro Highlands and dropping out onto the Serengeti plains. You arrive at Kubu Kubu Tented Camp with the afternoon in hand, and the evening is spent by the fire.

Kubu Kubu sits on a rise in the central Serengeti with long views out over the grass, and the tents are proper rooms with hard floors and full bathrooms rather than anything you would pitch. That combination (canvas walls, complete comfort, and nothing but plains outside), is what makes tented camps the right choice out here.

A full day across the central Serengeti tracking the lion prides, checking the riverine acacias for leopard, and working the open ground for cheetah. You return to camp for a private candlelit dinner set up under the stars.

The central Serengeti is reliable in a way the migration is not. Its river runs year-round, so the resident predators hold territory here permanently and the guides know them individually. Whatever the season, this is the part of the park where a full day almost always produces something worth the drive.

A morning safari on the Ngorongoro Crater floor (600 metres down into the caldera, where lion, elephant, buffalo and flamingo come quickly and black rhino are the one to hope for), then the transfer to Arusha for your flight across to Zanzibar and on to your private sea-view villa.

It is a big day, and the geography of it is remarkable. You start on the floor of a volcanic caldera at altitude in the cool of the morning and finish on a warm coast a thousand kilometres east. Few honeymoons manage that much variety inside twenty-four hours.

Nothing scheduled before a private couples spa session, and then the afternoon on white sand with warm shallow water in front of you. The day closes with a sunset dhow cruise and champagne.

Give this day over entirely. After five days of dawn starts and long drives the body takes a while to understand that nothing is required of it. The tide here moves several hundred metres in and out, so the beach changes shape through the day. Worth asking the villa staff when the water will be deep enough to swim.

A private guided tour through the alleys of Stone Town (carved doors, the Sultan's Palace, the House of Wonders and the site of the old slave market), followed by a spice plantation in the afternoon, where cinnamon, vanilla, cloves and nutmeg all grow within a few metres of each other. Dinner is seafood on the beach.

Zanzibar's wealth came from cloves, and for much of the nineteenth century this island supplied most of the world. That trade, and the darker one running alongside it, built the town you spend the morning walking through. It is a beautiful place with a hard history, and worth understanding rather than only photographing.

Breakfast at the villa, then a private transfer to Zanzibar International for your flight home.

Eight days is a tight but well-shaped honeymoon: three headline wildlife destinations, a genuinely unusual treehouse, and three nights on the coast to recover. If you have the leave available, adding another two or three days in Zanzibar at the end is the change almost everyone wishes they had made.