Click here to see my itinerary in Serengeti & Ngorongoro provided by Meru Slopes Tours & Safari

Serengeti National Park is a UNESCO designated World Heritage Site. Learn why here.

Ngorongoro Conservation Area, visit the official site or take a photo tour provided by Google Arts & Culture.

The Republic of Tanzania maintains a website with information on the nation’s remarkable parks. Access it here.

Safari Tours
Your company will arrange all aspects of your tour including accommodations. These will arrange from a camping tent at sites such as Seronera Camp, to a glamping set-up to the Four Seasons. Let your safari company know what you want. One of my group was driven to her booked hotels both nights and one was almost one hour away. Safari can be very affordable.

Meru Slopes Tours & Safari This is the agency with whom I booked my safari, only two weeks out. Excellent service but be patient about requests such as asking you to pay cash. I refused and there was no problem. I left a number of things in the car and got everything back.

Bushlove Safaris. Start-up by my guide/driver and wonderful cook, Godfrey. I have total confidence in these guys. Please give them a look.

There are many more safari companies. Some of the embedded links in the to the right reference reputable tour companies. Check them out as well.

Arusha accommodations
Booking.com is the first place I look to make hotel reservations. I have found that Hotels.com has better prices for Tanzanian properties so make sure you check both sites.

Equator Hotel. A budget-friendly city-center hotel with a country feel and a very accommodating staff.l. Ask for a room overlooking the large garden and enjoy the batik panels in the dining room.

Venice Hotel Inexpensive but with AC, and cable. The nearby nightclub made for a noisy night but it was Christmas.

Arusha Tourist Inn Very inexpensive rooms near shopping, no A/C. However Arusha’s elevation does not make AC a requirement.

For more, see my safari itinerary on the Africa page.

QUESTIONS?

Leave yours in the comment section below and I’ll be sure to answer.

“Serengeti” was the only name I knew. Ngorongoro Crater was vaguely familiar from National Geographic but Lake Manyera and Tarangire National Parks were unknown to me. (See my safari itinerary on the Africa page.)

My first stop was Lake Manyara, home of the tree-climbing ions. Manyara and Tarangerie seem to swap out as first and last stops on many itineraries. After seeing three lions on a tree limb (just think about the size of the tree for that to happen), I spent the night at the basic Fig Tree Inn.

I had been invited by another guide to have dinner with this group. (Not all of the arrangements were clear-cut to me, I must admit.) I met a young man from Zurich who had just climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro. His group included two young Moroccan women living in Paris and a newly wed couple from the US.. I came across this group each day including the bride in her wedding gown. She was incongruously, if faithfully, photographed by the Swiss climber.
Later that night I was invited by the guide’s father to visit him north of Arusha..

The next morning I joined a new group with a new driver to head to Serengeti. My group included a Swedish & English couple living in Malmo, a couple from Budapest, a young Swiss women (on her latest trip to Arusha, who left her husband at home). They were wonderful companions.

Serengeti National Park was established in 1952. It is home to what is one of greatest wildlife concentrations on earth. The population of wildbeasts, zebras, and antelope is beyond compare. The number of lions, cheetahs, elephants, giraffes, and birds is startling. The park covers 5,700 sq miles, (14,763 sq km). It can hold one and a half Yellowstone National Parks with room to spare. And it has a feathered dinosaur, the Secretary Bird. Really! (Of course, all birds are descendants of dinosaurs but this bird and the ostrich will convince you of this.)

The key to a safari is your guide and driver. I am sure that we had one of the best. He would speak to us like this: “Zebras and wildebeests are friends.” “The enemy of the baboon is the lion.” Animals did not make sounds. Instead they had “voices.” He told us which conducted “revenge attacks” and why. Trees did not have habitats, they had “rules for living” Elephants — intelligent, social, and so improbable — were wild dangerous but would “respect” our vehicle. I hung on each bit of safari poetry.

Drivers seem to work as independent contractors — or at least since the restart of trips in the Covid era. Of the the four parties (totaling six persons) in my group, we had contracted with three separate companies. Joseph, of Bush Lovers Safari, constituted a fourth company. Our car, unlike most others, did not carry a logo. Camps seemed busy enough but we were mostly alone on the roads. The most cars we saw at one time was in Ngorongoro Crater as four lionesses strolled along the road. Guides communicate by radio and share prime sightings liberally so the crowd of vehicles was not unexpected.

If an army runs on its stomach, then so too does a safari. You will have a cook accompany you and this will be the second most important person to you in Africa. We ate very well with soup to start every dinner and fresh fruit to end it. Camps contain huge and primitive kitchens, where I suspected the cooks also slept. (I met a number of guides and cooks; all were men.) Godfrey was a delight to talk to. He surprised me with how much he knew about the wildlife. He even told us a funny story or two about previous guests. And well as a frighting one about a lion killing a guest at the tent camp where we stayed. (We were just two or three feet away from a pride of lions but I think I felt the most vulnerable when at least two water buffalo grazed around the footprint of my tent in Ngorongoro. As their flanks pressed against the wall of my tent, I could only imagine their horns and hoofs and mass as I lay still.)

As much as I enjoyed the wildlife, it is an appreciation of the trees of Africa and its geology that helped to complete the experience for me. The baobab tree — towering, massive, ancient — will make you respect the power of chlorophyll and photosynthesis, of bark and branch. These trees make giraffes and elephants shrink. The crowns of the acacia tree trace the vault of the sky as it limbs lift to the sun like a greeting. The sausage tree, its cylindrical fruit hanging as in a butchers window, stands witness to thousands of wildebeests, zebras, and gazelles.

Serengeti means “endless plain.” But not an unoccupied one for certain or an uninterrupted one. I was especially taken by the koppies or tors, the outcroppings of the ancient Precambrian subsurface rock, revealed through erosion of the softer surface volcanic rock. It lies bleached and scored by sun and rain. The granite and quartzite islands were concentrated like a fleet of of grey Navy ships traveling through a sea of grass. On one koppie stood a lioness. Across from her on another was a lone baboon. Enemies observing a truce enforced by a geological flotilla on the endless grass plain. I longed to get out and explore, to stand on 4 billion old earth and look toward young volcanoes in the distance. However, leaving your safari car is prohibited.

On our first morning in Serengeti, Joseph took us to where three male lions had just taken down a water buffalo. I had expected to see a partially-eaten carcass but what I saw was a water buffalo frozen in the moment of death, legs in the air, a mouth tortured in pain. Three young male lions laid in the tall grass nearby. Soon there was a very nonchalant stand-off between them and a small pack of hyenas. We wanted to see a contest but it was not to be. It made me think that while our imaginations have been captured by deadly scenes of the survival of the fittest and dramatic contests between predator and prey, animals in the wild probably behave regularly much like the scene we were privileged to observe: hesitant and dispassionate; quiet and still, as if all parties were deliberating their options.