4-Day Tanzania Northern Circuit Experience
On this four-day lodge safari, you will visit Lake Manyara National Park, Tarangire National Park, the Ngorongoro Crater, and Serengeti National Park. The seasonal sight of thousands of wildebeests and zebras crossing the grassland savannah is something to behold and is surely one of Africa’s natural wonders. You will be rewarded with beautiful landscapes, an animal-filled crater, and thousands of flamingos on this tour.
After being picked up at the hotel or the airport you will depart for Tarangire, which is Tanzania's third-largest national park and a sanctuary for an unusually large elephant population. Majestic baobab trees are an interesting feature of the park—they dwarf the animals that feed beneath them. Animals concentrate along the Tarangire River, which provides the only permanent water supply in the area. There is a great diversity of wildlife, including lions, leopards, cheetahs, and up to six thousand elephants. Enjoy a game drive with a picnic lunch. Dinner and your overnight stay will be at the lodge.
After an early breakfast you’ll pick up picnic lunch boxes and drive to Ngorongoro Crater for a crater tour. You will descend 2,000ft/600m to the floor of the crater for a half-day excursion. You’ll explore the forest areas that are inhabited by monkeys and elephants, the lake area where you may see flamingos, and the open savannah where the lions hunt for food. Lunch in the crater will be a picnic with great views of the marshes, hippos, and birds. In the afternoon, you’ll drive to Serengeti National Park and continue game driving before settling into the camp for dinner and your overnight stay.
We will once more enjoy an early breakfast and set off on our game drive at about 6:30 am, spending 6-7 hours exploring this incredible park. The Serengeti is the habitat for an abundance of wildlife, including impala, buffalo, crocodiles, and hippo. It is most well-known, however, for its great migrating herds of zebras (two hundred and fifty thousand), wildebeest (one and a half million!) and antelope (half a million). The animals’ trek is determined by the rainfall and varies from year to year. Apart from the migrating herds, we may see predators, such as leopard, cheetah, and lion, stalking their prey. At roughly 2:00 pm, we will head back to Karatu, arriving at our carefully selected mid-range partner lodge in time for dinner. We'll be in an excellently appointed restaurant (with a pool nearby for relaxation if desired) before partaking in a digestif by the fire with the endless African sky above. Your capacious quarters await you for a night of ease and dreams of wild cats.
After breakfast, you will drive to your final destination on this epic safari: Lake Manyara National Park. This is a relatively small but diverse park situated 120km west of Arusha. The park’s namesake is a shallow, salt lake. It covers a large area of the park, flooding and drying with the seasons and is home to thousands of flamingos and over 500 other bird species. During your exploration you will see monkeys, giraffes, zebra, wildebeests, buffalo, elephants and, with some luck, lions lounging in the trees. The park is known for its various landscapes—not only open grassy plains but also primate-filled woodlands and baobab-dotted cliffs. After extensive game drives through the park, you will head back to Arusha and the airport for your departure.