5-Day Tarangire & Ngorongoro Mid-Range Safari

Your guide meets you at Kilimanjaro International and you head south without stopping in town, crossing the Maasai Steppe as the country opens out around you. You reach Tarangire in the afternoon with time for a game drive among the baobabs, and the elephant herds do most of the work of introducing you to Tanzania.

Going straight to the park on arrival day is the single best decision on a short itinerary. Rather than losing an evening to an Arusha hotel, you spend your first night in a tented camp inside the bush, listening to whatever is moving around outside as you fall asleep.

A full day in the park with a picnic lunch, which lets your guide range south into the quieter sections along the river rather than circling the busy northern loop. Elephant in large numbers are a certainty, lion are resident and usually found, and both leopard and cheetah reward patience.

Tarangire is at its most extraordinary between June and October. As the rest of the region dries out, the river becomes the only permanent water for a long way in any direction and the game funnels in: elephant, buffalo, zebra, wildebeest and eland all concentrating along one narrow green corridor. Its bird list, over 550 species, is the longest on the northern circuit.

A morning drive up through the Ngorongoro Highlands to Karatu, gaining altitude the whole way as dry steppe gives over to cultivated green slopes. The afternoon is yours: a walk into town, a coffee farm tour, or an afternoon doing nothing at the lodge before an early start tomorrow.

Karatu is farming country, and a good reminder that most of Tanzania is not a national park. The volcanic soil here is deep and red and grows almost anything: coffee on the hillsides, maize and wheat across the flats, all of it worked by Iraqw families who have farmed these highlands for generations. At 1,500 metres the evenings are cool enough for a jacket.

An early descent into the crater for a half-day safari on the floor, timed so you are down there while the game is active and before the vehicles from Karatu arrive in numbers. Lion, elephant, buffalo, hyena and huge herds of zebra and wildebeest are all but certain; black rhino are the one to hope for. Picnic lunch by the hippo pool, then back up the wall to Karatu for the night.

Standing on the rim looking down is one thing; being on the floor is another entirely. The caldera is 260 square kilometres of grassland, swamp, soda lake and yellow-barked acacia forest, walled in on every side, holding around 25,000 large animals that have no particular reason ever to leave.

You drop back down the escarpment for a morning game drive in Lake Manyara, entering through the groundwater forest and coming out along the lakeshore. Flamingos, hippos and the park's celebrated tree-climbing lions are all on the cards, and then it is a relaxed drive back to Arusha, arriving by early afternoon for your flight or onward transfer.

Manyara is a fine park to end on precisely because it is nothing like the crater. Where Ngorongoro is vast and open and frankly overwhelming, Manyara is close and green and detailed (forest canopy, birdsong, monkeys overhead), and it sends you home with a second register of memory alongside the big set-piece one.