4-Day Private Guided Tanzania Safari Tarangire, Serengeti, Manyara

After breakfast at the hotel, depart for Tarangire, Tanzania's third largest national park and sanctuary for an unusually large elephant population. Majestic baobab trees are an interesting feature of the park, dwarfing 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 your accommodation.

You'll have early breakfast, take picnic lunch boxes and drive to Ngorongoro Crater for the crater tour. You will descend 2000 feet over 600 meters to the floor of the crater for a half day crater tour. Explore the forest areas that are inhabited by monkeys and elephants, the lake area where you may see the flamingos and the open savannah where the lions hunt for food. Lunch in the Crater will be taken at a picnic site with great views of the marshes with hippos and birds. Ngorongoro Crater is nicknamed the Eighth Wonder of the World and it is for a good reason. Here, an amazing panorama unfolds. A collapsed volcano spanning 102 miles, home to lions, rhinos, hippos, hyenas and antelopes by the thousand. In the afternoon, drive to Serengeti National Park and continue with a game drive before you set down at your lodge 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, such as impala, buffalo, crocodile and hippo. However, it is well-known 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, plying their rough trade. At roughly 2:00 pm, we will head back to Karatu, arriving at our carefully selected mid range partner lodge for dinner. We'll be in an excellently appointed restaurant, with a pool for relaxation if desired, a digestif by the fire below the endless African sky perhaps, and our capacious quarters awaiting us 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, 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. On your exploration of the park you will see monkeys, giraffe, zebra, wildebeest, buffalo, elephant 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 an extensive game drive through the park, you will head back to Arusha.