8 Days Tanzania Safari

An early start south-west, through Maasai grazing land, and into the park by mid-morning. Tarangire is baobab country — thousands of them, some over a thousand years old — and in the dry months the river running through it draws elephant from a much wider area than the park itself.

You game drive through the middle of the day along the river, where the concentration is highest, then work back out towards the highlands in the late afternoon.

You climb over the Ngorongoro highlands and drop onto the plains — the moment the country opens out is one people remember. There is a stop at the Olduvai Gorge on the way, where the Leakeys found some of the oldest hominin remains yet recovered.

Two full nights in the central Serengeti gives you four game drives around the Seronera valley, which holds resident lion prides year-round and some of the most reliable leopard sightings in Tanzania. In February the herds are on the plains to the south; from July they are up in the north.

Back east across the plains with a game drive as you go, then up onto the crater rim in the afternoon. Standing at the viewpoint and looking six hundred metres down onto the floor, with the whole ecosystem laid out below, is worth the drive on its own.

You descend early the following morning — see the next day — so tonight is about resting and getting to bed at a reasonable hour.

You are on the descent road at opening, which puts you on the floor before the queue forms. Six hours in the crater usually produces lion, hyena, elephant, hippo, buffalo and enormous numbers of plains game — and, if the day goes your way, black rhino at distance.

Out by early afternoon and down to Lake Eyasi, a soda lake in the Rift below the highlands, where you overnight ahead of an early start.

A very early start to join a Hadzabe hunting party at first light. The Hadzabe are one of the last hunter-gatherer peoples in Africa and still hunt with bow and arrow — you walk with them, and it is genuinely strenuous rather than a performance. Afterwards there is usually time with the Datoga blacksmiths who make their arrowheads.

Then east to Lake Manyara for an afternoon drive through the groundwater forest, and back to Arusha in the evening.

Rather than sit in a hotel waiting for an evening flight, you spend the last morning on the Chagga smallholdings below Kilimanjaro: a walk to the Materuni waterfall, then a coffee farm where you pick, husk, roast and grind by hand and drink the result.

Lunch is local, and your guide has you at the airport in good time. If you are heading on to Zanzibar instead, we transfer you to the domestic terminal.