Ten days, for two

You land at Kilimanjaro International, most likely in the evening, because that is when the long-haul routings arrive. Your guide is at the door with your names on a board. The drive west to Arusha is fifty kilometres and about an hour, through coffee shambas and the lower slopes of Mount Meru, and you will not see much of it in the dark.

Tonight is a coffee estate outside town rather than a hotel in it. The estates sit on the volcanic slopes at around 1,400 metres, and the difference from a city hotel is the quiet: you wake to birds and the smell of the drying beds rather than traffic on the Nairobi road. If your flight lands early enough there is a walk through the coffee before dinner; if it does not, there is dinner.

Nothing else is planned. This is the first night of a honeymoon and the last of a twenty-hour journey, and the itinerary is built so that the safari starts tomorrow, rested, rather than tonight. Repack into soft bags — the light aircraft on day 3 has a weight limit and a hold that does not take hard cases.

You leave after a proper breakfast and drive west on tarmac. The road drops onto the floor of the Rift Valley, passes Lake Manyara on the left, and then climbs the Rift wall in a series of bends to Karatu at 1,900 metres — highlands farming country, and noticeably cooler. There is a viewpoint at the top of the escarpment where everyone stops, and it is worth stopping.

From Karatu the road enters the Ngorongoro Conservation Area and climbs again, through forest, to the rim. The crater appears all at once: a caldera nineteen kilometres across with walls six hundred metres high and its own weather, often with cloud pouring over the western wall while the floor stays clear. You reach it by early afternoon with the light still good.

You sleep on the rim tonight rather than in Karatu, and that is the point of the day. It puts you at the descent road at dawn instead of an hour behind the vehicles that stayed below. The rim is at 2,300 metres and cold after dark — properly cold, with fires lit in the rooms. Bring the warm layer out of the bag before dinner, not after.

You are on the descent road as it opens, in the dark, with breakfast in a box. The crater floor holds cloud until mid-morning and the first hour after it lifts is the best game viewing of the day. By ten there will be a great many vehicles down there with you; at half past six there are a handful, and the light is low across the Lerai forest.

The floor is 260 square kilometres and the animals largely do not leave, which is why the density is what it is. This is the most reliable place in Tanzania to see black rhino — a few dozen animals, usually at a distance, so bring the binoculars. Lion here are habituated to a degree that is almost uncomfortable, and the old elephant bulls on the floor carry some of the heaviest ivory left in East Africa.

You are up the ascent road by late morning and driving back down to the Lake Manyara airstrip on the Rift floor. The flight to the Serengeti is about an hour, low, with the crater highlands and then the short-grass plains under the wing. Your camp’s vehicle meets the aircraft and the drive to camp is a game drive whether anyone calls it one or not. Three nights here, one camp, no packing.

The vehicle is yours, which changes the shape of a day more than people expect. Out at six with coffee, or out at eight after breakfast; back for lunch and a sleep in the heat, or a full day with a picnic under a kopje. Nobody else’s plan is in the vehicle with you.

The Seronera 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 lookout, and safe ground for cubs — and the resident prides here are the reason the central Serengeti works in any month. Cheetah hunt the open ground south of the river in the early morning before the heat.

Where the migration is on this day depends on your dates. In June and early July the herds are usually moving through the west and centre; from January to March they are on the southern plains an hour or two south of here. In August and September they are in the far north, a long day’s drive away, and we will say so before you book rather than after. The cats do not move with them.

If you have added the balloon, this is the morning. You leave camp in the dark for the launch site, lift off at first light, and spend about an hour drifting over the plains at tree height with the shadows still long. It lands to a breakfast set out in the grass. It is a serious expense and it is weather-dependent — the pilot decides on the morning, and a cancelled flight is refunded, not rescheduled, because there is no spare morning.

If you are not flying, the alternative is the quiet one: a long drive out towards the Moru kopjes, where there is a resident black rhino population, Maasai rock paintings on the granite, and far fewer vehicles than along the river. Your guide will have his own idea of where yesterday’s leopard went, and he is usually right.

The evening is a bush dinner: a table set away from camp, a fire, lanterns, and the Serengeti sky, which has no light pollution at all. We ask every camp for this in advance for honeymoon couples. Whether it happens on this exact night depends on the camp and the weather, and what the camp adds to it — a private table, something on the bed, a bottle — is the camp’s gesture and at the camp’s discretion. We ask; we do not promise on their behalf.

A last drive on the way to the airstrip, which in practice is the best drive of the three days — early, cold, and everything still out. Then the aircraft. Flights from the Serengeti to Zanzibar normally route through Arusha with a stop on the ground, and the whole thing takes three to four hours door to door. It is a long morning of sitting, and it saves two days on the road.

Zanzibar is at sea level, hot and humid, and the change from the highlands at 1,500 metres is immediate when the aircraft door opens. You are met and driven to the coast. The east and north-east coasts are about an hour from the airport; Stone Town is twenty minutes, and you can see it on the way out on day 10 rather than now.

Four nights on one stretch of beach, and nothing scheduled for the rest of today. The Indian Ocean on the east coast has a large tide — at low water the reef flat is exposed for a kilometre and the swimming is off a boat or in the pool; at high water it is off the sand. Ask for the tide table at check-in. It runs the next four days more than the clock does.

The first full day on the coast is the one where you do nothing, and we mean it. Five days of six o’clock starts end here. Breakfast comes when you appear for it. The beach on the east coast faces the sunrise, so the light is best early and the shade is best after lunch.

If you want something, the reef is it. Zanzibar’s east coast sits behind a fringing reef a kilometre or so offshore, and at high water a boat runs you out to snorkel over coral in a few metres of clear water — parrotfish, angelfish, the occasional turtle. The Mnemba atoll off the north-east corner is the best of it and is reached by boat from the beach; it is a marine conservation area with a fee per person, which the hotel collects.

In the afternoon the tide goes out and the women of the village walk onto the reef flat to tend the seaweed lines, which are the coast’s other economy. It is worth walking out with the water at your ankles, in reef shoes — the flat is sharp — to see how far the sea goes. Dinner is on the sand if the hotel does that, and most on this coast do.

A half day inland is the one excursion worth the drive. Zanzibar grew rich on cloves, and the spice farms in the centre of the island still grow clove, nutmeg, cinnamon, vanilla, cardamom and black pepper on the same ground. A guide walks you through and hands you things to crush and smell; it takes two hours and it is the best explanation of why the island exists that you will get. Or stay on the beach. Both are correct.

The evening is the one we would add. A dhow — the lateen-rigged wooden boat that has crossed this ocean for a thousand years — taken out for two hours before sunset, with the sail up, the engine off, and nobody else aboard but the crew. On the west coast the sun sets into the sea; on the east it sets behind the island, and the sea goes pink instead. Either works.

The dhow is an add-on rather than included because it is a private charter and priced as one, and because some couples would rather have the evening on the sand. It is weather-dependent and the skipper’s call on the day; in the June to September south-easterly the east coast can be too lively, and we will tell you which coast your hotel is on before you decide.

The last full day is kept empty on purpose, because the itineraries that fill it — Stone Town and a spice farm and a dolphin boat in one day — end a honeymoon with a schedule. If there is something from the week you wanted to do again, this is the day it fits: a second boat to the reef, or a walk up the beach to the village and the fishing boats coming in at midday.

One honest note on the dolphin trips sold along the south coast at Kizimkazi. They exist and they see dolphins; they also put several boats around one pod and drop swimmers on top of it, and we do not arrange them. If you want to be in the water with something, the reef is better and kinder.

Tonight is the last night on the coast. The hotel knows this is a honeymoon — we will have written to them, as we write to every property on this route — and most do something with the last dinner. What that is, and whether it is anything, is theirs to decide. Our part is to ask early and to tell you plainly that we have asked, not to sell you a gesture that belongs to somebody else.