Day 1 - Flight to Tanzania
Depart from London on your overnight flight with Kenya Airways to Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, with a short connection in Nairobi.
Includes meals on your flight.
Day 2 - Tarangire National Park
Arrive at Kilimanjaro Airport in the morning where our representative will meet you, and drive you out to a quiet hotel on the outskirts of Arusha town. Here you will have the use of a day room, so can freshen up and relax after your overnight flight. Take a few hours to lounge around the hotel's pool and enjoy a filling lunch and then, at 14:00, meet with your safari group and guide before departing for Tarangire National Park.
It takes around three hours to drive to the park, along mostly tarmac roads, during which you pass through countless small villages and towns. This is a great chance to learn something of local Tanzanian life, with people taking produce to market, Maasai grazing cattle on the roadside and children playing. If you have any questions your guide will be happy to answer them and help give you a real insight into local life and culture.
Shortly after turning off the tarmac road you arrive at the Tarangire park gate. Here you will lift your pop-top roof for better game viewing and start on a short afternoon game drive. The 2,600km2 Tarangire National Park is often over looked by other travellers visiting Tanzania and so offers a relatively quiet safari experience, as well as great game. During the wet season this is one of Tanzania's best parks for bird watching and during the dry season it has an excellent density of elephants and plains game.
As the evening draws in, you will arrive at Tarangire Sopa Lodge where you will have dinner and stay overnight.
Includes breakfast on the flight, lunch and dinner.
Days 3 & 4 - Serengeti National Park
Depart your lodge after breakfast and spend most of the morning exploring the stunning Tarangire National Park, which is home to elephant, giraffe, zebra, wildebeest, eland, warthog, lion and leopard, as well as the localised fringe-eared oryx, gerenuk and lesser kudu.
At about 11:00 leave Tarangire behind and continue up towards the Ngorongoro Crater. Though you won't be going in just yet, you have time to stop and admire the views from the rim of the world's largest intact caldera. Stop for a hot lunch at the Ngorongoro Serena Lodge, looking down over the Crater floor where you might spot lines of wildebeest making their way across the plains.
After a leisurely lunch, carry on towards Tanzania's Serengeti National Park where you have an afternoon safari drive. The name Serengeti comes from the Maasai word for 'endless plain' and at this southern end of the park you can certainly see why! Flat grassy plains carry on as far as the eye can see, interrupted only by the occasional kopje (small rocky outcrop). Loop roads take you around kopjies where lion love to snooze in the afternoon sun, and plains game graze on the surrounding grasses. You arrive at the Serengeti Sopa Lodge in the early evening, with a bit of time to relax in your room or the bar area, both of which have lovely views out over the Serengeti plains.
It's a full-day safari in the Serengeti National Park the following day; head out with a packed lunch so that you can optimise your time wildlife viewing. Explore all the different areas of the central Serengeti, from Seronera, which is renowned for its density of lion, to the Moru kopjies where you can see traditional Maasai rock art.
Includes breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Days 5 & 6 - Ngorongoro Conservation Area
Leave the Serengeti at a leisurely pace, stopping to watch any wildlife that you see along the way. As you pass from the Serengeti into the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, stop off to visit the archaeological site of Olduvai Gorge and have a picnic lunch. This is the area of Tanzania where Louis and Mary Leakey discovered evidence of early man and the first remains of Homo habilis - giving rise to the area's nickname the 'cradle of mankind'.
Continue up to the Ngorongoro Crater and drive around its rim to the eastern side, where you will spend the next few nights of your safari at the Ngorongoro Sopa Lodge. Arrive in the late afternoon, in time to enjoy a sundowner on the bar's terrace as the sun sets.
Get up early the next morning to descend 600m from your lodge onto the Ngorongoro Crater floor for a full day's safari, stopping only to have your packed lunch in one of the shady picnic spots. Drive past the alkaline Lake Magadi, which often has hundreds of pink flamingos feeding in its waters, and the hippo pool at Ngoitokitok Spring, then across the open grasslands. The wildlife in this stunning oasis is incredible and visitors are more than likely to see a variety of plains game as well as predators such as hyena and lion.
Includes breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Day 7 - Flight to London
After breakfast, leave Ngorongoro Sopa Lodge and the Crater behind you and drive back towards Kilimanjaro Airport. In the early afternoon arrive at Kia Lodge, a convenient hotel located only a few miles from the airport. Here you will have access to a day room and some lunch, before transferring on to the airport in plenty of time to connect onto your international overnight flight to London.
Alternatively, you may wish to extend your lodge safari to Tanzania by including time relaxing on the beach. If so then add one of our tailor-made Expert Africa beach add-on holidays to Zanzibar, Pemba, Ras Kutani or the Mafia Archipelago, to your itinerary. Call us to ask about this and to get a possible quote.
Includes breakfast. Dinner is provided on your flight.
Day 8 - Arrive back in London
Arrive in London after a fantastic action-packed lodge safari, with plenty of Tanzanian wildlife photos to sort through.
|
