3-Day Tarangire & Lake Manyara · Camping Safari

You are collected at Kilimanjaro International and driven south the same day, reaching Tarangire in the afternoon with time for a game drive before the light goes. Camp tonight is inside the park itself at the public campsite, with your cook setting up while you are still out among the elephants.

There is no fence around the campsite, which is precisely why people book this trip. Elephant walk through after dark, and you will hear hyena working the edges of the site through the night. It is a completely different proposition from watching the same park from a lodge veranda a few kilometres outside the boundary.

Out early for a morning game drive in Tarangire before packing up and driving north to Lake Manyara. The afternoon is spent game driving in Manyara, in and out of the groundwater forest and along the lake edge. Tonight you camp at Panorama, high on the escarpment rim above the valley.

Panorama earns its name. It sits on the lip of the Rift Valley wall with the lake, the park and the entire valley floor laid out several hundred metres below you. Sunset from up there, with dinner cooking and the light going orange across the water, tends to be the photograph people remember from the whole trip.

A last morning game drive in Lake Manyara (the forest is at its best early, with baboons on the road and birds everywhere) before the drive back to Arusha for your flight or onward transfer.

Camping cuts the cost of a Tanzanian safari roughly in half without cutting the wildlife, because you are in the same parks, with the same guide, looking at the same animals. What you trade away is a hot shower and a soft mattress. What you get back is nights spent inside the parks with nothing between you and the bush but canvas.