4 Days Safari in Tanzania, Lake Manyara, Serengeti and Ngorongoro

After breakfast your guide collects you from your accommodation in Moshi and you set off for Lake Manyara National Park. The drive takes around three hours, running west across farmland and Maasai country before the road drops toward the floor of the Great Rift Valley, where the park sits below a tall escarpment.

Manyara is a narrow park hemmed between the Rift wall and the soda lake, and the lake itself sets the tone. Its shallows draw big colonies of waterbirds, with flamingos standing out in bright pink among the pelicans, storks and cormorants that make up part of the park's tally of more than four hundred bird species. The park is also known for its lions, which have a habit of resting up in the acacia branches, a skill at climbing you rarely see in other prides, usually spotted lazing in the open central woodland.

On your game drive you should also see giraffes, buffaloes, hippos, elephants, zebras and a good deal more. Late in the afternoon you leave the park. Lunch and dinner are provided, and you spend the night at a campsite near the village of Mto wa Mbu.

After breakfast you break camp and drive on toward the Serengeti. The road climbs past the town of Karatu and up through the green farmland and forest of the Ngorongoro highlands, then the country opens out as you drop onto the vast southern plains of the Serengeti, flat grass running to the horizon on every side.

The Serengeti is the oldest park in Tanzania and the heart of a much larger ecosystem that reaches into Kenya's Maasai Mara and the Ngorongoro Conservation Area. That wider system carries the great migration, with well over a million wildebeest on the move along with hundreds of thousands of gazelles and zebra and thousands of topi. In all the park holds around three million large animals, one of the richest concentrations of wildlife on the continent.

Beyond the herds you look for giraffe, elephant, buffalo, hyena and crocodile, and this is prime cat country, with lions in good numbers, cheetahs out on the plains and leopards along the rivers. You spend the day working across the grass before settling in. Breakfast, lunch and dinner are provided, and you camp in the central Seronera area of the Serengeti.

You start with more time in the Serengeti, out early for a morning game drive while the light is soft and the animals are active. The Seronera area around the campsite is one of the better parts of the park for big cats, thanks to its river and rocky outcrops, so the morning is a good chance for lion, cheetah and leopard before you turn back east.

Around the middle of the day you leave the plains and head toward the Ngorongoro Crater. There are no fences between the two conservation areas, so the game viewing stays good along the way and the drive doubles as a slow safari rather than just a transfer. You watch the country change from open grass back up into the greener highlands.

Your camp for the night is Simba Camp, set on the crater rim, where the tents look out over the edge and down to the crater floor far below. As the light fades the view across the bowl is worth the walk to the edge. Breakfast, lunch and dinner are provided, and you spend the night on the rim at Simba Camp.

If the sky is clear, early risers get a fine sunrise over the crater from the rim before breakfast. After you eat, the safari drops down into the crater on a steep access track, descending roughly six hundred meters from the rim to the floor, where the land flattens out into open grass, swamp and a soda lake.

The crater measures somewhere between seventeen and twenty one kilometers across and holds a slice of the East African savanna wildlife in one contained bowl. Depending on the season it shelters some fifteen to twenty five thousand animals, mostly grazers such as wildebeest, zebra, gazelle and buffalo, and that concentration of prey draws in predators. The crater has one of the highest predator densities in Africa, with well over a hundred lions living here in several prides. This is one of the best places to look for all of the Big Five, lion, leopard, elephant, buffalo and rhino, in a single short outing.

You spend the morning on the floor before climbing back up in the afternoon and starting the drive back to Moshi. Breakfast and lunch are provided, and the trip ends on your return to Moshi.