12-Day Ultimate Bush, Crater & Private Island Honeymoon

You are met on arrival at Kilimanjaro International by your private guide and driven to Gran Meliá Arusha, where check-in happens in the suite with Mount Meru filling the windows. Nothing is scheduled: sleep, swim, eat, and let a long flight and a wedding recede.

This itinerary is built almost entirely around private charters, which means that from tomorrow you will not queue for anything or share a vehicle with strangers. Tonight is the only ordinary night of the trip, and it exists purely so that you begin the rest of it rested.

A private charter flight south to Tarangire, taking twenty minutes rather than half a day, and straight into an afternoon game drive among the giant baobabs and elephant herds. After dark there is a night game drive, using spotlights to find the animals that never appear in daylight.

Night drives are rare in Tanzania, prohibited inside most national parks and only possible in private concessions like this one. What comes out after dark is a completely different cast: genets, civets, bushbabies, aardvark if you are extraordinarily lucky, and lion that hunt far more actively than they ever do at noon.

An early guided walking safari, on foot with an armed ranger, moving slowly through country you have so far only driven through. The late afternoon is a game drive, and the day closes with a sundowner set up on the escarpment above the Tarangire River.

Walking changes your relationship to the place entirely. From a vehicle you are watching; on foot you are in it: reading tracks, working the wind, conscious of your own noise. An hour walking teaches you more about how the bush actually functions than a week of driving through it.

A private charter into the Ngorongoro Highlands, climbing from hot low country into cool volcanic uplands in a matter of minutes. You arrive at The Highlands, where the suites are geodesic domes set on the slopes of the Olmoti volcano, and dinner is served under the stars.

The Highlands is one of the most striking places to stay in East Africa. The domes are glass-fronted and wood-lined with wood-burning stoves, sitting at around 2,600 metres on open moorland where Maasai still graze cattle. It is genuinely cold at night, and lying in bed watching the stars through the dome is why people book it.

A full day on the crater floor rather than the standard half, descending early and staying down. That extra time is what lets you work the Lerai forest for elephant, spend proper time at Lake Magadi with the flamingos, and give black rhino a real chance rather than a passing look. A private champagne picnic is set up in a secluded corner of the floor.

A full-day crater permit is the most worthwhile upgrade on the northern circuit. Most vehicles do a four-hour circuit and leave by early afternoon; staying means you are still there once they have gone, when the light softens and the predators that have been lying up start to move again.

A private charter west to the Grumeti and a transfer to Singita Faru Faru Lodge inside the private reserve. The afternoon is a game drive through country that sees almost no other vehicles at all.

Singita Grumeti is a conservation concession of roughly 350,000 acres bordering the national park, and the exclusivity is real rather than a marketing line. You may go an entire drive without seeing another car. Two decades of anti-poaching and habitat work have brought wildlife numbers back substantially, and it is one of the better places in East Africa for African wild dog.

A pre-dawn start for the balloon: lifting off as the sky greys, drifting a few metres above the grass in complete silence except for the burner, then rising to see the plains run out in every direction. You land to a champagne breakfast set up in the bush. The afternoon is a couples massage at the lodge spa.

The balloon is the single most memorable hour of most trips to the Serengeti. It is silent in a way nothing else out here is, the animals barely react, and the perspective (the herds, the kopjes, your own shadow travelling across the grass below), is unavailable any other way.

A full day on the plains, out early and back late, looking for the big prides, the leopard along the watercourses, and the cheetah that hunt the open ground. Off-road driving is permitted throughout the private reserve, so your guide can position properly rather than settling for whatever the track offers.

The freedom to leave the road is the practical luxury of a private concession. Inside the national park your angle and distance are fixed by where the track happens to run; here your guide can come round into the light, hold a low position beside a pride, and stay with a hunt as it develops rather than losing it at the first turn.

A flight east to Zanzibar, then a private vehicle across the island and a boat out to Mnemba, a small private island off the north-east coast with a handful of bandas and nothing else on it. You settle into a beachfront banda with the reef a few metres away.

Mnemba is about as exclusive as the Indian Ocean gets. The island is a private concession accommodating perhaps twenty guests in total, the surrounding waters are a protected marine reserve, and there is no schedule, no menu and no clock. You eat what you want, when you want, usually on the sand.

A day in and on the water. The reef around the island is protected and in excellent condition, and a private guide takes you out to it: dolphins are frequently around Mnemba, green turtles nest on the island itself, and the fish life is exceptional. Kayaking along the coast and beach yoga are both available if you would rather stay above the surface.

The Mnemba atoll is one of the best-preserved reef systems on this coast, protected since the 1990s and closed to fishing. The practical result is coral in genuinely good condition and fish in numbers you will not see off the main island, which, given the state of reefs worldwide, is not a small thing.

A final full day with nothing whatsoever in it. Swim, sleep, walk the whole island in about twenty minutes, and swim again. The day ends with a candle-lit dinner served on the sand under the stars, with the reef breaking somewhere out in the dark.

Twelve days is long enough to have genuinely stopped, and this is the day it registers. There is nowhere to go on Mnemba and nothing to organise, which after nearly a fortnight of charters, game drives and early starts is precisely the point of finishing here rather than somewhere with more to do.

A boat transfer back to the mainland and a private car across Zanzibar to the international airport for your flight home.

This is about as complete a Tanzanian honeymoon as it is possible to assemble: Tarangire on foot and after dark, a full day inside the Ngorongoro Crater, a private Serengeti reserve with a balloon over it, and three nights on a private island. The charters are what hold it together, without them the same route would take eighteen days, most of it spent in a car.