4 Day Tanzania Safari — Tarangire, Ngorongoro & Manyara

You are collected from Kilimanjaro International Airport or your Arusha hotel after breakfast and drive south-west to Tarangire, about two hours on tarmac. Tarangire is elephant country: the river holds water when the surrounding land does not, so the dry season concentrates big herds along it, and the park's baobabs give it a landscape found nowhere else on the northern circuit. You game drive the afternoon along the river circuit and leave for your camp towards sunset.

A morning game drive in Tarangire while the light is still low, then out of the park and up into the Ngorongoro highlands, climbing through farmland and forest to Karatu on the crater's outer slopes. The drive is roughly three hours with stops. The afternoon is yours — the altitude here is around 1,500 m and the evenings are cool, so a fleece is worth having.

The day the trip is built around. You descend into the crater shortly after dawn, when the floor is still cold and the predators are still moving. Ngorongoro is a largely self-contained ecosystem of some 260 square kilometres carrying one of the highest predator densities in Africa, and it is the most reliable place in Tanzania to see black rhino. You game drive the floor through the morning, take picnic lunch beside the hippo pool, and climb back out in the early afternoon.