3-Day Tarangire, Ngorongoro & Manyara from Zanzibar

You are collected from your Zanzibar hotel at 05:20 for the morning flight to Arusha, where your guide meets you and drives straight to Tarangire National Park. You reach the gate by mid-morning, leaving most of the day in the park — famous for its ancient baobabs and some of the largest elephant herds in Tanzania. Picnic lunch is served at a scenic site at 13:00, then you game drive until 17:00 in search of elephant, giraffe, zebra, buffalo, lion and leopard, with exceptional birdlife throughout. Dinner and overnight at your lodge in the highland town of Karatu.

After an early breakfast at Omega View Lodge you drive the short distance to the Ngorongoro Conservation Area and begin the descent — the road drops some six hundred metres to the caldera floor. Ngorongoro holds one of the densest concentrations of wildlife in Africa inside a caldera roughly twenty kilometres across, and is among the most reliable places on earth to see all of the Big Five in one day, black rhino included. Picnic lunch is served on the crater floor at 13:00. You ascend in the late afternoon and return to Omega View Lodge in Karatu for dinner and overnight.

After breakfast you check out of Omega View Lodge and descend the Rift Valley escarpment to Lake Manyara National Park. The morning is spent in its groundwater forest and along the lakeshore, looking for elephant, buffalo, hippo, large baboon troops and the tree-climbing lions for which Manyara is known, with flamingo and pelican massed on the soda flats. Lunch is at 13:00, after which you leave the park and drive to Kilimanjaro International Airport for your evening flight back to Zanzibar. Your guide stays with you until you are checked in.