10 Day Luxury Tanzania Safari Serengeti & Ngorongoro Crater

MORNING THE ROAD SOUTH WEST

Depart Arusha after breakfast for the drive into the Ngorongoro Conservation Area roughly four hours, with stops. The road climbs steadily out of the rift floor, past Mto wa Mbu and up the escarpment, and the vegetation changes with the altitude: acacia gives way to montane forest, the temperature drops, and the air turns cool and wet. You cross into the Conservation Area and continue past the crater rim viewpoint before turning north, away from the crowds, towards the higher country around Olmoti.

AFTERNOON ARRIVAL AND FIRST WALK

Arrive at camp in the early afternoon. This is the highest ground in the Conservation Area, and the view runs across grassland and scattered bomas to the Gol Mountains and the south eastern Serengeti plains beyond. After lunch, a short orientation walk on the forest edge with your guide enough to get the altitude into your legs and to start reading the highlands: the cattle trails, the buffalo sign, the Maasai land use patterns that have shaped this landscape for centuries.

EVENING

The highlands get genuinely cold after dark. Dinner beside the fire, and an early night tomorrow begins on foot.

MORNING DESCENT INTO EMPAKAAI

Drive to the rim of the Empakaai Crater and descend on foot with an armed Conservation Area ranger. The path drops around three hundred metres through montane forest steep, shaded, thick with birdsong and opens onto the shore of the soda lake that fills half the caldera floor. Lesser flamingo work the shallows in numbers that shift with the season. Buffalo graze the lake margin. On a clear morning the cone of Ol Doinyo Lengai stands to the north east, and the Rift wall runs away beyond it.

AFTERNOON HIGHLAND COUNTRY

The climb out is the honest part of the day. Lunch follows in the field or back at camp, depending on how the morning has run, and the afternoon is deliberately unstructured: rest if you want it, or continue with a walk into the surrounding highlands. The alternative is a visit to a neighbouring Maasai homestead in the late afternoon, timed for the hour when the cattle are brought back to the boma the busiest and most honest part of a pastoral day, and a far better window into the culture than any staged performance.

EVENING

Back at camp as the temperature drops. Dinner, the fire, and the particular quiet of high country.

EARLY MORNING THE DESCENT

An early breakfast and the drive around the rim to the descent road. The crater is a 260 square kilometre caldera with walls six hundred metres high, and the descent is an experience in its own right the floor opens below you, the mist burns off the Lerai forest, and the scale of the place resolves as you drop into it. Arriving early matters: the first hours belong to the animals rather than to the vehicles.

FULL DAY ON THE CRATER FLOOR

The whole day is spent below the rim. Resident elephant bulls old, heavy tusked, and largely solitary work the Lerai fever tree forest. Buffalo gather in the hundreds on the open grassland. Lake Magadi, the shallow soda lake at the centre, draws flamingo and a long list of waterbirds. Ngorongoro remains one of the few places on the continent where black rhino are seen with any regularity, and your guide will know which part of the floor the resident animals have been favouring. Lion here are numerous and have never known life beyond the walls. Picnic lunch is taken on the floor.

EVENING

Late afternoon ascent and the drive back to camp through the highland forest. The crater rewards a full day in a way it cannot reward a morning the light changes, the animals move, and the second half of the day looks nothing like the first.

MORNING OLDUVAI AND THE DESCENT TO THE PLAINS

Leave the highlands after breakfast and drop south west through the Conservation Area. The route passes Olduvai Gorge, where the Leakeys’ excavations rewrote the early human record, and there is time to stop at the site and its small museum. Beyond Olduvai the country flattens and opens out into the short grass plains volcanic soil, almost no trees, enormous sky. The transition from montane forest to open plain happens over the course of a single morning.

AFTERNOON ARRIVAL AND FIRST WALK

Arrive at Mwiba in time for lunch. Mwiba is a private wildlife reserve rather than a national park, and that distinction is the reason it is here: on private land, you can get out of the vehicle. The afternoon is a guided walking safari with an armed professional guide through the reserve’s acacia woodland and rocky kopje country. On foot the scale changes completely tracks, dung, alarm calls and the wind direction all start to matter, and the guiding shifts from spotting to reading.

EVENING NIGHT DRIVE

After dinner, a night drive with a spotlight. Genet, civet, bushbaby, spring hare, white tailed mongoose and occasionally leopard or a hunting lioness an entirely different set of animals from the daylight cast, and an activity that simply is not permitted inside the Serengeti or Ngorongoro.

MORNING THE ESCARPMENT COMMUNITIES

An early start for the Eyasi escarpment, where Hadzabe families still live by hunting and gathering, and Datoga pastoralists work iron in open forges nearby. Handled well, this is one of the more remarkable mornings in Tanzania: you go out with the men at first light, walk as they walk, and watch a way of life that predates agriculture in East Africa. It is not a performance and it is not scheduled to a timetable which is precisely what makes it worth doing.

AFTERNOON SPRINGS, GORGE AND GAME

The afternoon stays inside the reserve. Mwiba is cut by a gorge and fed by natural springs, and in the drier months those springs concentrate wildlife with real intensity elephant, giraffe, buffalo, eland and a strong resident predator population. Game drives here run without other vehicles in sight. There is also time to do nothing much at all: this is a long journey, and an afternoon on a deck above the gorge is not wasted time.

EVENING

Dinner in camp. The reserve is unfenced, and the sounds after dark make that obvious.

MORNING ACROSS THE SOUTHERN PLAINS

Depart after breakfast and drive north into Serengeti National Park. The route crosses the southern short grass plains, and between roughly December and March those plains are where the migration sits vast, dispersed herds calving on the volcanic soil, with predators working the edges. Outside that window the plains empty out and become one of the emptiest and most beautiful landscapes in Africa. Either way, the drive is a game drive; nothing about it is dead time.

AFTERNOON THE MORU KOPJES

Reach the Moru sector by early afternoon. Moru is granite country: ancient outcrops rising out of grassland, each one an island with its own hyrax colonies, klipspringer, resting lions and euphorbia. The first afternoon drive works the kopje line and the marshy ground between the outcrops. This is a genuinely quieter part of the Serengeti well south and west of the Seronera corridor, with a fraction of the vehicles.

EVENING

Into camp before dark. Three nights here, which means no packing in the morning and no clock running.

MORNING

A full day out with a picnic lunch packed. The morning takes in the Maasai rock paintings sheltered beneath an overhang at Moru red and white ochre shields and figures, left by Maasai warriors and still legible and the Gong Rock nearby, a slab of granite that rings when it is struck, used as a signalling instrument for generations. Very few Serengeti itineraries stop here at all.

AFTERNOON

Moru holds a small, closely protected black rhino population, one of the last in the Serengeti, and the sector is patrolled accordingly. Sightings are never a certainty, but the afternoon is spent in the right country with a guide who knows the ground. Beyond the rhino, this is excellent lion and leopard habitat: the kopjes give the cats elevation, shade and cover, and they use all three. The Moru marshes hold hippo, buffalo and a heavy concentration of birdlife. Optional: Hot Air Balloon Safari A pre dawn ascent over the southern Serengeti plains, drifting low over the grassland as the light comes up, followed by a champagne bush breakfast on landing. USD 599 per person.

EVENING

Back at camp by sunset. Dinner under a sky with nothing between you and it.

MORNING

The last full day, and the one that is deliberately left open. By now your guide knows what you want to look at and what the resident animals have been doing, and the day is planned over breakfast rather than in advance. A pride followed over two days, a leopard that has been moving along a particular drainage line, a cheetah with cubs on the open ground you go back to whatever the last few days have made interesting.

MIDDAY

Return to camp for lunch and the long, hot, quiet middle of a Serengeti day. This is the part of a safari that gets removed from shorter itineraries, and it should not be. The plains at midday are worth watching from a chair.

AFTERNOON

Out again in the late afternoon for the best light of the day. Sundowners on a kopje with the plains running out in every direction, and back to camp in the dark.

MORNING

A final short game drive on the way to Seronera Airstrip, then a scheduled light aircraft flight back to Kilimanjaro International Airport for your onward connection. Timings are set by the day’s published schedule and confirmed before departure. Ten days, four bases, and a version of northern Tanzania that most visitors never slow down enough to see: the highlands walked rather than driven, a private reserve at night, and a Serengeti sector given the time it needs.