Name: 4 Day Tanzania Lodge Safari at Tarangire and Serengeti National Parks and Ngorongoro Crater
Brand: Heart of Serengeti
Price: 3622 USD
Availability: InStock

Tanzania Safari

During this four-day Tanzania safari, you will visit three of the most well-known reserves on Tanzania’s “northern circuit” - Tarangire National Park, Ngorongoro Crater, and Serengeti National Park.

Key information

Group safari
Starting and ending points: Arusha
English speaking guide
All park fees are included

Highlights

4 game drives
See gazelles, wildebeests, zebras, giraffes, and elephants
Visit Tarangire and Serengeti National Parks and Ngorongoro Crater
Ride in a pop-up roof 4X4 vehicle
3 nights accommodation
Daily meals
All park fees included

Styles

4 activity days in English

Airport transfer included: Kilimanjaro International Airport

Program

Itinerary

Day 1: Arusha - Tarangire National Park

This four-day Tanzania safari will start today. After morning breakfast at the lodge, you will drive to Tarangire National Park. You will start your amazing game safari in the afternoon by exploring the park’s uniqueness. Overnight will be served at the lodge.

Day 2: Karatu - Serengeti National Park

After breakfast in the morning, your safari today will take you to Serengeti Park. At the Naabi gate, you will have your lunch and later proceed inside the park for a game safari tour before it gets a night. Overnight will be at the lodge.

Day 3: Serengeti - Ngorongoro Crater

You will have an early morning game drive at the Serengeti Plain before starting your trip to the Ngorongoro Conservation Area. On your way, you may stop by the Maasai bomas to meet the traditions and culture of the Maasai society. You will proceed to drive to the lodge for rest and dinner.

Day 4: Ngorongoro - Arusha Airport

This is the final day of this safari. In the morning, you will drive down the crater for a game drive. You will see the amazing things in the crater including a large number of animals living together in one small niche. Also, you may get a chance to see the endangered black rhino. After lunch, you will drive to Arusha.

About the safari

With all the diverse landscapes and a crater full of animals, this lodge safari has something for everyone and is ideal for those with limited time.

Location

The safari will take place in Tanzania.

Tarangire National Park

Tarangire National Park has some of the highest population density of elephants as compared to anywhere in Tanzania, and its sparse vegetation, strewn with baobab and acacia trees, makes it a beautiful and distinctive location to visit. Located just a few hours' drive from the town of Arusha, Tarangire is a popular stop for people traveling through the northern safari circuit on their way to Ngorongoro and the Serengeti. The park extends into two game-controlled areas and the wildlife is allowed to move freely throughout.

Before the rains, droves of gazelles, wildebeests, zebras, and giraffes migrate to Tarangire National Park’s scrub plains where the last grazing land still remains. Tarangire offers unparalleled game viewing, and during the dry season, elephants abound. Families of the pachyderms play around the ancient trunks of baobab trees and strip acacia bark from the thorn trees for their afternoon meal. Breathtaking views of the Maasai Steppe and the mountains in the south make a stopover at Tarangire a memorable experience.

Herds of up to 300 elephants scratch the dry river bed for underground streams, while migratory wildebeest, zebra, buffalo, impala, gazelle, hartebeest, and eland crowd the shrinking lagoons. It is the greatest concentration of wildlife outside the Serengeti ecosystem - a smorgasbord for predators - and the one place in Tanzania where dry-country antelope such as the stately fringe-eared oryx and peculiar long-necked gerenuk are regularly observed.

During the rainy season, the seasonal visitors scatter over a 20,000 square kilometers (12,500 square miles) range until they exhaust the green plains and the river calls once more. But Tarangire’s mobs of elephants are easily encountered, wet or dry. The swamps, tinged green year round, are the focus for 550 bird varieties, the most breeding species in one habitat anywhere in the world. On drier ground you find the Kori bustard, the heaviest flying bird; the stocking-thighed ostrich, the world’s largest bird; and small parties of ground hornbills blustering like turkeys.

More ardent bird-lovers might keep an eye open for screeching flocks of the dazzlingly colorful yellow-collared lovebird, and the somewhat drabber rufous-tailed weaver and ashy starling - all endemic to the dry savannah of north-central Tanzania. Disused termite mounds are often frequented by colonies of the endearing dwarf mongoose, and pairs of red-and-yellow barbet, which draw attention to themselves by their loud, clockwork-like duetting. Tarangire’s pythons climb trees, as do its lions and leopards, lounging in the branches where the fruit of the sausage tree disguises the twitch of a tail.

Serengeti National Park

Serengeti National Park is undoubtedly the best-known wildlife sanctuary in the world, unequaled for its natural beauty and scientific value, it has the greatest concentration of plains game in Africa. The Serengeti National Park in Tanzania was established in 1952. It is home to the greatest wildlife spectacle on earth - the great migration of wildebeest and zebra. The resident population of lions, cheetahs, elephants, giraffes, and birds is also impressive. There is a wide variety of accommodation available, from luxury lodges to mobile camps.

The park covers 5,700 square miles, (14,763 square kilometers), it is larger than Connecticut, with at most a couple hundred vehicles driving around. The park can be divided into three sections. The popular southern or central part (Seronera Valley), is what the Maasai called the “serengit”, the land of endless plains. It is a classic savannah, dotted with acacias and filled with wildlife. The western corridor is marked by the Grumeti River and has more forests and dense bush. The north, Lobo area, which meets up with Kenya’s Masai Mara Reserve, is the least visited section.

Two world heritage sites and two biosphere reserves have been established within the 30,000-square-kilometer region. The Serengeti ecosystem is one of the oldest on earth. The essential features of climate, vegetation, and fauna have barely changed in the past million years. Early man himself made an appearance in Olduvai Gorge about 2,000,000 years ago. Some patterns of life, death, adaptation, and migration are as old as the hills themselves. It is the migration for which Serengeti is perhaps most famous.

Over a million wildebeest and about 200,000 zebras flow south from the northern hills to the southern plains for the short rains every October and November, and then swirl west and north after the long rains in April, May, and June. So strong is the ancient instinct to move that no drought, gorge, or crocodile-infested river can hold them back. The wildebeests travel through a variety of parks, reserves, and protected areas and through a variety of habitats.

Ngorongoro Crater

The jewel in Ngorongoro’s crown is a deep, volcanic crater, the largest unflooded and unbroken caldera in the world. About 20 kilometers across, 600 meters deep, and 300 square kilometers in area, the Ngorongoro Crater is a breathtaking natural wonder. The Ngorongoro Crater is one of Africa’s most famous sites and is said to have the highest density of wildlife in Africa. Sometimes described as an ‘eighth wonder of the world’, the Crater has achieved world renown, attracting an ever-increasing number of visitors each year.

You are unlikely to escape other vehicles here, but you are guaranteed great wildlife viewing in a genuinely mind-blowing environment. There is nowhere else in Africa quite like Ngorongoro. The Ngorongoro Crater is the world’s largest intact volcanic caldera. Forming a spectacular bowl of about 265 square kilometers, with sides up to 600 meters deep; it is home to approximately 30,000 animals at any one time. The Crater rim is over 2,200 meters high and experiences its own climate.

From this high vantage point, it is possible to make out the tiny shapes of animals making their way around the crater floor far below. Swathes of cloud hang around the rocky rim most days of the year and it is one of the few places in Tanzania where it can get chilly at night. The crater floor consists of a number of different habitats that include grassland, swamps, forests, and Lake Makat (Maasai for ‘salt’) - a central soda lake filled by the Munge River.

All these various environments attract wildlife to drink, wallow, graze, hide, or climb. Although animals are free to move in and out of this contained environment, the rich volcanic soil, lush forests, and spring source lakes on the crater floor (combined with fairly steep crater sides) tend to incline both grazers and predators to remain throughout the year.

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Food

You will be served daily meals included in the price.

The following meals are included:

Breakfast
Lunch
Dinner

The following dietary requirement(s) are served and/or catered for:

Regular (typically includes meat and fish)

If you have special dietary requirements it's a good idea to communicate it to the organiser when making a reservation

What's included

4 game drives
All tours and entrance fees per itinerary (unless listed as excluded)
3 nights accommodation
All meals
All transportation and transfers per itinerary
Professional English-speaking naturalist driver and guide
Transportation in a custom safari 4×4 with a viewing roof and guaranteed window seating
Safari vehicles with an inverter for charging batteries, a communications radio, an electric cooler, and filtered water
National park gate fees, park commission, and government taxes (based on current rates)

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