Seven days on the Northern Circuit

You are met at Kilimanjaro International and driven to Arusha, an hour west through coffee shambas and the foothills of Mount Meru. If your flight lands early there is time to eat properly and repack before the road south.

The drive to Tarangire runs down the Great North Road and then east onto the floor of the Rift. The landscape changes twice in ninety minutes — cultivated highland, then Maasai grazing country, then baobab. You will see your first giraffe from the tarmac.

Camp is reached in time to wash and sit down before dark. Nothing is scheduled for this evening on purpose; the first night of a safari is for sleeping.

Tarangire in the dry season concentrates game along one river, and that is the whole reason to be here in these months. Elephant families come down to dig for water in the sand; between June and October the herds along the Tarangire River are the densest in the north.

The park is also the best baobab country on the circuit. They are not scenery — the trees are hollowed by elephants working the fibre for moisture, and the scars tell you how hard the last dry season was.

Look up as well as out. Tarangire holds more breeding bird species than any single habitat on earth, and the dry riverbed draws them into one place: yellow-collared lovebirds, hornbills, and the ashy starling that lives nowhere else.

Lake Manyara is small and completely unlike the parks either side of it. The road enters under closed groundwater forest fed by springs at the base of the escarpment — fig and mahogany, blue monkeys overhead, and troops of baboon on the track.

The forest opens onto floodplain and the soda lake. Flamingo numbers swing wildly with the water level, so this is not a promise; some months there are thousands, some months there are none. Hippo pools at the northern end are reliable.

In the afternoon the road climbs the Rift wall. The view back over the lake from the top is the one everybody stops for. You reach the Ngorongoro rim in time for the temperature to drop — it is high here, and it is cold at night.

You descend six hundred metres onto the floor of a collapsed volcano twenty kilometres across. Because the walls are steep the animals largely stay, which is why the crater holds a density of game that nowhere else matches — roughly twenty-five thousand large animals inside 260 square kilometres.

It is the most reliable place in Tanzania to see black rhino, and one of the few where lion, elephant, buffalo, leopard and rhino can be seen inside a single morning. The lions here are famously easy to find and famously inbred; the population has never recovered its diversity since the 1962 fly plague.

Vehicles must leave the floor by late afternoon, so this is a half-day by regulation rather than by choice. Lunch is taken at the hippo pool at Ngoitokitok, where the kites will take a sandwich out of your hand if you eat outside the vehicle.

The road out of the conservation area crosses the short-grass plains of the southern Serengeti ecosystem — treeless, volcanic, and between December and March the calving ground for the entire migration.

Olduvai Gorge is on the way and worth the stop. The sequence of beds cut into the gorge wall holds nearly two million years of hominin occupation, and the small museum on the rim puts the Laetoli footprints in front of you rather than in a textbook.

You enter the park at Naabi Hill, where the plains give way to the kopjes and acacia of the Seronera valley. The last two hours are a game drive whether or not anyone calls them one.

One full day, no transfer, no packing. This is the day the trip is built around and it is why the itinerary does not try to add a seventh park.

Seronera’s river holds water all year, and the fig and sausage trees along it are the most dependable leopard habitat in Tanzania. The granite kopjes standing out of the grass are lion furniture — shade, a vantage point, and safe ground for cubs.

Where the migration is on this day depends entirely on the month, and any operator who tells you otherwise in advance is guessing. What is reliable in the Seronera valley is resident game: lion, leopard, cheetah on the open ground, elephant, buffalo, hippo, and giraffe in the acacia.