Tanzania under canvas
duration
6 nights - 6 and a half days
place of departures
hotel in Arusha
reference route
KS265
departure day
daily on request
transport
landcruiser 4x4
 


  • itinerary
  • tariff
  • lodges
  • parks

Day 1 Arusha - Tarangire Park - 120 km / 2h00 approximately
After lunch (not included) depart from Arusha to Tarangire Park through some wonderful scenery.(2h) Once in the park, enjoy a game drive before leaving the park to stay at your camp in a unusual area amongst rare palm trees. Dinner and overnight at Maramboi Tented Camp.

Day 2 Tarangire Park - Lake Manyara - 125 km / 2h00 approximately
After breakfast, depart for Lake Manyara Park with a picnic lunch so you can enjoy a long game drive before climbing out of the Great Rift Valley to the cooler climes of Ngorongoro. Dinner and overnight at Tloma Lodge

Day 3 Lake Manyara - Serengeti Park - 240 km / 5h20 approximately
After breakfast, depart for the Serengeti with game viewing en route and finally arriving at your lodge for lunch. In the afternoon you can go on a good game drive until evening. Dinner and overnight at Kati Kati Tented Camp

Day 4 Serengeti Park
Full day game drive in the park. Full board at Kati Kati Tented Camp.

Day 5 Serengeti Park - Ngorongoro - 190 km / 4h approximately
After breakfast, depart on a game drive heading to Ngorongoro. En route stop by Ol Duvai Gorge, famous for the discovery of the remains of early hominids. There is a small but interesting museum. After your packed lunch, continue to the Ngorongoro Crater with a game drive as you go. Dinner and overnight at Ngorongoro Farm House.

Day 6 Ngorongoro Crater
In the morning, after breakfast, descend to the crater floor for a full-day game drive, with a packed lunch by a lake before continuing and finally returning to your lodge in the evening. Dinner and overnight at Ngorongoro Farm House.

Day 7 Ngorongoro Crater - Arusha - 190 km / 3h approximately
After breakfast depart for Arusha arriving in the late morning.

Prices are per person for the entire route

from 16 december 2014 to 31 december 2015
Basic fee for 2/3 persons:
prices from US$ 3.015 per person in a double room
Basic fee for 4/5 persons:
prices from US$ 2.320 per person in a double room
Basic fee for 6/7 persons:
prices from US$ 2.090 per person in a double room

The safaris are guaranteed with a minimum of two people from 16/12/2013 to 31/03/2014 and from 01/07/2014 to 31/10/2014 and with a minimum of four people from 01/04/2014 to 30 / 06/2014 from 01/11/2014 to 15/12/2014. The guarantee of a seat is always subject to availability of space in the car and lodges indicated in the itinerary. It may be necessary to reverse the parks in the itinerary without, however, changing its quality.


Maramboi Tented camp
The Maramboi Tented Camp has permanent facilities that offer stunning views of Lake Manyara, the Rift Valley and in clear days even Ol Donyio Lengai, the mountain sacred to the Maasai. The camp consists of 30 spacious tents built on wooden platforms, all equipped with bathroom and private veranda, with 24 hr. electric lighting. For families, there are tents with two adjoining rooms. Meals are served in the large tent in the centre of the camp, or in the garden under a starry sky.

Tloma Lodge
Tloma Lodge is an exclusive lodge with 36 cottages located within the area of Ngorongoro. Its excellent location on the raised shoulder of a valley, offers a breathtaking view of a coffee plantation on the eastern wall of Ngorongoro crater. Tloma Lodge was modeled on the design of its "big brother" Ngorongoro Farm House and its garden is particularly rich in flowering plants and shrubs. In the midst of this garden, guests can enjoy a swim in the heated outdoor pool. All 36 rooms, which are divided between double and triple, are equipped with a private bathroom and have views of Ngorongoro. Meals are generally served in the main lodge, but sometimes you can enjoy it outside around the beautiful pool.

Kati Kati Tented
The Kati Kati Tented Camp is a mobile camp sited in the centre of the Serengeti, in a strategic position that covers the vast plains of the national park. The camp offers comfortable accommodation and a unique opportunity to enjoy the true experience of a safari camp where you are totally immersed into this wilderness. The camp is only a two hour drive from the Olduvai Gorge and the Grumeti River. All meals are served in a cosy mess tent which is located in the middle of the camp. After dinner you can relax in front of the campfire, recalling the day’s adventure and perhaps hear the haunting call of the Spotted Hyena floating over the silvered plains. The camp consists of 10 tents with private bathrooms.

Ngorongoro Farm House
Ngorongoro Farm House was opened on 20 February 2003 and offers 52 cottages, all with ample interior space, and is built in the style of an old colonial farm, furnished in rustic style with local materials and rich details of good taste, with the aim to offer guests an imaginary journey into the times of yesteryear. The lodge is a perfect stop within any safari in the northern circuit of Tanzania, and a special place to visit the crater or enjoy a range of activities such as a walking safari in the adjacent forest or a trip to the nearby Lake Eyasi in the Rift Valley.

Tarangire National Park
It is the vast number of baobab trees that first captures the eye as you enter Tarangire National Park. The gently rolling countryside is dotted with these majestic trees, which seem to dwarf the animals feeding beneath them. Although elephant will be the primary focus of our time in Tarangire, it has plenty of other animals for us to see. It is spectacular at the height of its season, during the dry months of July to December, when the animals migrate, many of them daily, to the permanent water of the Tarangire River. The species seen is very diverse from a large population of elephants to wildebeest, zebra, buffalo, impala, gazelle, and eland range along the dry river banks. With a smorgasbord of wildlife, predators are ever present. During these months, you would be witness to the second largest concentration of wildlife per square kilometre within Africa! It is second only to Ngorongoro Crater. The animals aren't the only factor that impresses so many of our guests but the large variety of habitats provides us with amazing birdlife of over 550 species. This is a long park and as one ventures further south it becomes increasingly wild, exciting and unpredictable. By mid March the place is brittle and dry as towering purple-grey clouds gather over the horizon heralding Biblical thunder storms of lighting and rain sweeping across the plains, creating raging torrents from the dusty luggas. Overnight some of the animals start migrating back to the vast Maasai Steppes that surround this park to pastures new until, in the month of June onwards, the sun dries the bush once more to start wildlife’s long trek back to Tarangire River. The circle of life begins. Tarangire Park is wild and varied. To us it is a wonderful park, truly “Africa Uncompromised”.


Manyara Park
Stretching for 50km along the base of the rusty-gold 600-metre high Rift Valley escarpment, Lake Manyara is a scenic gem, with a setting extolled by Ernest Hemingway as “the loveliest I had seen in Africa”. The compact game-viewing circuit through Manyara offers a virtual microcosm of the Tanzanian safari experience. From the entrance gate, the road winds through an expanse of lush jungle-like groundwater forest where hundred-strong baboon troops lounge nonchalantly along the roadside, blue monkeys scamper nimbly between the ancient mahogany trees, dainty bushbuck tread warily through the shadows, and outsized forest hornbills honk cacophonously in the high canopy. Contrasting with the intimacy of the forest is the grassy floodplain and its expansive views eastward, across the alkaline lake, to the jagged blue volcanic peaks that rise from the endless Maasai Steppes. Buffalo, wildebeest and zebra herds congregate on these grassy plains, as do giraffes – some so dark in coloration that they appear to be black from a distance. Inland of the floodplain, a narrow belt of acacia woodland is the favoured haunt of Manyara’s legendary tree-climbing lions and impressively tusked elephants. Squadrons of banded mongoose dart between the acacias, while the diminutive Kirk’s dik-dik forages in their shade. Pairs of klipspringer are often seen silhouetted on the rocks above a field of searing hot springs that steams and bubbles adjacent to the lakeshore in the far south of the park. Manyara provides the perfect introduction to Tanzania’s birdlife. More than 400 species have been recorded, and even a first-time visitor to Africa might reasonably expect to observe 100 of these in one day. Highlights include thousands of pink-hued flamingos on their perpetual migration, as well as other large waterbirds such as pelicans, cormorants and storks.


Serengeti Park

Great stretches of Africa in 1913 were still unknown to the white man when Stewart Edward White, an American hunter, set out from Nairobi. Pushing south, he recorded: "We walked for miles over burnt out country... Then I saw the green trees of the river, walked two miles more and found myself in paradise." He had found the Serengeti. In the years since White's excursion under "the high noble arc of the cloudless African sky," Serengeti has come to symbolize paradise to many of us. The Maasai, who had grazed their cattle on the vast grassy plains for millennia had always thought so. To them it was Siringitu - "the place where the land moves on forever." Tanzania's oldest and most popular national park, also a world heritage site and recently proclaimed a 7th worldwide wonder, the Serengeti is famed for its annual migration, when some six million hooves pound the open plains, as more than 200,000 zebra and 300,000 Thomson's gazelle join the wildebeest’s trek for fresh grazing. Yet even when the migration is quiet, the Serengeti offers arguably the most scintillating game-viewing in Africa: great herds of buffalo, smaller groups of elephant and giraffe, and thousands upon thousands of eland, topi, hartebeest, impala and Grant’s gazelle. The spectacle of predator versus prey dominates Tanzania’s greatest park. Golden-maned lion prides feast on the abundance of plain grazers. Solitary leopards haunt the acacia trees lining the Seronera River, while a high density of cheetahs prowls the south-eastern plains. Almost uniquely, all three African jackal species occur here, alongside the spotted hyena and a host of more elusive small predators, ranging from the insectivorous aardwolf to the beautiful Serval Cat. But there is more to the Serengeti than large mammals. Gaudy agama lizards and rock hyraxes scuffle around the surfaces of the park’s isolated granite kopies. A full 100 varieties of dung beetle have been recorded, as have 500-plus bird species, ranging from the outsized ostrich and bizarre secretary bird of the open grassland, to the black eagles that soar effortlessly above the Lobo Hills. As enduring as the game-viewing is the liberating sense of space that characterises the Serengeti Plains, stretching across sunburnt savannah to a shimmering golden horizon at the end of the earth. Yet, after the rains, this golden expanse of grass is transformed into an endless green carpet flecked with wildflowers. And there are also wooded hills and towering termite mounds, rivers lined with fig trees and acacia woodland stained orange by dust. Popular the Serengeti might be, but it remains so vast that you may be the only human audience when a pride of lions masterminds a siege, focussed unswervingly on its next meal. Perhaps Dr. George Schaller best encapsulates the Serengeti when he wrote: "Yearning for hope and thriving on dreams, we find what we seek in the Serengeti. At least once in a lifetime every person should make a pilgrimage into the wilderness to dwell on its wonders and discover the idyll of a past now largely gone. If I had to select just one such spot on earth, it would be the Serengeti. There dwell the fierce ghosts of our human past, there animals seek their destiny, living monuments to a time when we were still wanderers on a prehistoric earth. To witness that calm rhythm of life revives our worn souls and recaptures a feeling of belonging to the natural world. No one can return from the Serengeti unchanged, for tawny lions will forever prowl our memory and great herds throng our imagination."
George Schaller. Wildlife Conservation International. Excerpts from.


Conservation Area of Ngorongoro Crater

After winding up through the rain forest on a snaking road and cresting the Crater Rim, the view is breathtaking. Beneath you the entire crater can be seen 600 metres below. This crater should correctly be called a caldera, when a volcano grows to a great height before collapsing, leaving a crater. This small world of animals has rightly earned a reputation as one of nature’s wonders. It holds as many as 50,000 animals living in a balanced ecosystem of 250 square kilometres. You will see almost every animal from enormous elephants, rhinos, hippos, many species of antelope, lions, leopards, cheetah and much more. There is a large variety of vegetation to enjoy from the verdant rain forests clothing the surrounding rim to the swamps, soda and clear water lakes, expansive plains and soda pans on the crater floor. With a picnic, you can spend the entire day or afternoon in this wonderland holding more ungulates and carnivores per square kilometre than anywhere else in the world. The area (8,228 sq. Km) extends out from the crater and includes vast plains and the famous Olduvai Gorge, where the Leakey family discovered some of the oldest fossil bones of our ancestors. In this vast area there are other craters, such as Olmoti, Lake Empakaai Crater, Mount Oldonyo Lengai and the Gol Mountains, offering those who want to venture into this wilderness for an exciting "off road" experience. A choice to suit all tastes.