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.

Depart after breakfast and drive across the Great Rift Valley to Lake Manyara National Park for a full day game drive. Although only 205sq miles in size, this enchanting park is noted for its beauty and incredibly lush acacia forest of giant fig and mahogany trees, which are home to troops of baboons and blue monkeys. The park is also home to large numbers of buffaloes, giraffes, elephants, impalas and a hippo lake, where large numbers of hippos usually gather. Well known for its birds (over 400 different species), Lake Manyara is one of the few places where you’ll be able to see the ground hornbill and the crested eagle. This park has become famous for tree-climbing lions and the flamingos on the lakeshore. The landscapes of this park are absolutely stunning, very different from the Serengeti for example. The game drives are done along the shore of the lake, providing incredible views of giraffes and buffaloes in the foreground with the lake, flamingos and flat plains on the horizon.

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.

We will do an after breakfast game viewing drive along the Sogore River Circuit, which loops into the plains south of the Seronera River. It is good for possible lion, Thomson gazelle, topi, ostrich and cheetah sightings. Afterwards, we will enjoy a relaxed picnic lunch at the visitors center in the shade of the giant acacia trees.
In the afternoon, we will follow the Kopjes Circuit, which goes anti-clockwise around the Maasai Kopjes, which usually attract a number of lion and some formidably large cobras. Kopjes are weathered granite outcrops, scattered around the plains, most of which are miniature ecosystems, providing shade and drinking water in pools left in the rock after the rains. This makes the kopjes particularly good for spotting wildlife in the dry seasons including lions, which like to lie in wait for animals coming to drink!

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.

After a leisurely breakfast, you will travel back to Arusha where you will arrive around midday. You will be dropped off in the city centre or at the airport.