After breakfast depart for Tarangire National Park. You’ll have a full day game drive in Tarangire National Park. Tarangire has a diverse landscape, with nine vegetation zones. Ancient Baobab trees (the largest trees in Africa) dot the landscape dwarfing the animals that feed beneath them. The Tarangire River, which meanders through the park attracts an abundance of wildlife, from elephants, lions, leopards, buffaloes, zebras, giraffes, antelopes to a variety of colourful birds. The park is very famous for having the greatest elephant population in Tanzania. During a safari, you will have the chance to quietly observe many families of elephants interacting. You will stop for a picnic lunch in an observatory inside the park where you will be able to view animals’ drinking water in the river (and many times lions attacking a thirsty zebra or wildebeest). You’ll continue game viewing after lunch. Later, you’ll return to the lodge for dinner and your overnight stay.

After breakfast, we’ll head towards the Serengeti National Park, via the beautiful high lying farmland of Karatu and the Ngorongoro Conservation Area. Leaving the highlands behind, we’ll descend into the heart of wild Africa—the Serengeti National Park —with its endless plains, rolling into the distance as far as the eye can see. We will head to the central park area, known as the Seronera area. It’s one of the richest wildlife habitats in the park, featuring the Seronera River. The river provides a valuable water source to this area, therefore, attracts wildlife well representative of most of the Serengeti’s species. We will arrive in time for lunch and enjoy an afternoon game drive in the Serengeti National Park.

The entire day is dedicated to game viewing in the Serengeti. The areas that you visit will depend upon where the migrating herds are. Predators usually follow closely behind the trekking animals and include lions, leopards (in the acacia trees) and cheetahs. During the short rainy season in November and December, the herds move from the hills in the north to the plains in the south. During the longer rainy season from April to June, they return up north. As the migration is completely dependent on the yearly rainfalls, the location of the herds may vary from year to year but your guide will know where to locate the animals and where to see them best.

This morning you will continue with further game drives in the Serengeti, at noon you will leave for Ngorongoro Conservation Area. On your outward journey to the park gate, you will enjoy some more game viewing before you leave the Serengeti National Park in the early afternoon to continue your journey to the Ngorongoro Conservation Area. As soon as you reach the edge of the Ngorongoro Crater, you will see the giant caldera below – a breath-taking view.

On this day we will head to Ngorongoro & then descend over 600m into the crater to view wildlife. Supported by a year round water supply and fodder, the Ngorongoro Crater supports a vast variety of animals, which include herds of wildebeest, zebra, buffalo, eland, warthog, hippo, and giant African elephants. Another big draw card to this picturesque national park is its dense population of predators, which include lions, hyenas, jackals, cheetahs and the ever-elusive leopard, which sometimes requires a trained eye to spot. We will visit Lake Magadi, a large but shallow alkaline lake in the southwestern corner, which is one of the main features of the crater. A large number of flamingos, hippos and other water birds can be seen here. After the game drive, we will start ascending from the crater and head to the lodge for dinner & overnight.

This impressive park is one of Tanzania’s most dramatically located wildlife areas, consisting of a massive but shallow soda lake (covering two-thirds of the park) at the foot of the Great Rift Valley’s western escarpment. The park’s varied habitat attracts a wide variety of animals, including one of Africa’s largest concentrations of elephants, Manyara’s famous tree-climbing lions, as well as large flocks of flamingos attracted by the algae in the lake. In the afternoon you will leave the park and head to Arusha/JRO.