8-Day Ndutu Migration Safari with Tarangire & the Crater

Breakfast is at about 8 am before the drive of about three hours to Ndutu. An hour in, you enter the Ngorongoro Conservation Area and the landscape changes from highland forest to open green grassland. At Ndutu you start game driving straight away, with a picnic lunch on the plains. Between December and March these plains become the calving grounds of the Great Migration, and lakes Ndutu and Masek draw wildlife through the year. You reach your camp at about 5 pm.

Two whole days to follow the herds. You can leave at 6 am for the early light, come back for breakfast and go out again with a packed lunch, or have a relaxed breakfast and stay out from 9 am to late afternoon. Your guide follows the migration wherever the grazing has drawn it. Ndutu is known for its cats: lion, cheetah and leopard hunt the young wildebeest, and smaller species such as serval, caracal and African wildcat live here too.

After breakfast you head north into Serengeti National Park, its name taken from the Maasai word for endless plains. The park covers 14,763 square kilometres and holds the greatest remaining concentration of plains game in Africa. Along the way, look out for the granite kopjes that rise out of the grass and give shelter to lions, hyraxes and agama lizards. Lunch is a picnic on the plains, and dinner is at your camp in the central Serengeti.

Choose between an early start with a return for breakfast, or a full day out with a packed lunch from about 9 am to 6 pm. The Seronera area is one of the richest wildlife habitats in the park, with the Seronera River providing water through the dry months. Outside the migration season the resident lion prides are the stars, and the trees along the river are good places to find a leopard. You return to camp for dinner.

After breakfast you have a morning game drive in the Serengeti, then leave for the Ngorongoro Conservation Area with a picnic lunch on the way. By late afternoon you reach the highlands and your lodge near the crater rim, where the evenings are cool and a warm jacket is welcome. The crater below is the largest unbroken, unflooded volcanic caldera in the world, around 20 kilometres across and ringed by the highlands' old volcanoes.

An early breakfast lets you start down into the crater at about 6:30 am, ahead of most other vehicles. The game drive on the floor lasts around five hours, with good chances of elephant, buffalo, black rhino, hippo, hyena, cheetah and lion. Lunch is a picnic at the hippo pool. You then climb the steep road out of the crater for the drive of about four hours back to Arusha, where we drop you at your hotel or chosen address at around 6 pm.