4-Day Serengeti & Ngorongoro Safari

You leave Arusha after breakfast and drive west. Within an hour the town gives way to Maasai grazing land, with the long wall of the Rift Valley escarpment ahead of you. Lake Manyara is about two hours away on good tarmac. The park entrance takes you straight into groundwater forest. It is tall, dark and dripping, fed by springs, not rain. It is a startling first impression if you were expecting open plains. Baboon troops sit in the road and blue monkeys move overhead. After a few kilometres the forest opens onto acacia woodland and the floodplain along the lake. You spend the afternoon working north to south through the park. There are elephant in the woodland, hippo in the pools at the northern end, and, if the water level is right, flamingo out on the soda flats.

A long driving day, and the one that gets you onto the plains. The road climbs the escarpment above Manyara, runs through the farmland around Karatu, and then up onto the rim of the Ngorongoro Crater, where the first view down onto the floor stops most people mid-sentence. From there the road crosses the conservation area westward, dropping steadily onto open grassland where the horizon flattens out and the acacias thin to nothing. You enter the Serengeti at Naabi Hill. Take the short climb for the view over the plains it guards. The last stretch to the central Serengeti is a game drive in its own right. This is the country the park is famous for, and the first giraffe against an empty sky is usually the photograph people keep.

The full Serengeti day, and the centre of this itinerary. Start early, even in the cold. In the first hour after dawn the cats are still moving and the light is at its best. The Seronera river valley is the focus. It has permanent water, with acacia and sausage trees along the banks, resident lion prides, and the most reliable leopard habitat on the northern circuit. The middle of the day is quiet, and that is by design. You have lunch under a tree or back at camp while the animals lie up in the shade. The afternoon drive then runs until the light goes. The time between sightings is the part people do not expect. Your guide reads tracks in the road, works out which way a pride moved overnight, and decides where you need to be in an hour.

You leave the Serengeti in the morning with a game drive on the way out, recrossing the plains toward the conservation area. The road climbs back into the highlands and the vegetation changes completely, from open grass to montane forest on the crater rim within the space of an hour. The crater descent is the day. Vehicles have six hours on the floor and the descent road opens at six-thirty, so the earlier you're through the gate the more of it you have to yourself. On the floor you're in an enclosed world: soda lake, Lerai forest with its old elephant bulls, open grassland with lion, and black rhino out toward the swamp at distance. Lunch is at the designated picnic site by the hippo pool.

The last morning is the drive back east. The road out of the highlands drops through Karatu and Mto wa Mbu, back past the Manyara escarpment, and onto the tarmac toward Arusha and the airport. It is around 270 kilometres and takes most of the middle of the day with a stop for lunch. There is usually time for a curio stop at Mto wa Mbu if you want carvings or fabric, and prices there are much better than at the airport. Most international flights leave Kilimanjaro late in the evening, so the timing works without a rush, and there's generally room for a day room in Arusha before the transfer if you want a shower and somewhere to repack.