Best-Priced Group 4×4 Kenya & Tanzania Safari

Your adventure begins in the town of Arusha, gateway to Tanzania’s premier safari destinations. You are collected from your hotel after breakfast to meet your guide and fellow travellers. You can now sit back and relax as the road takes you south to Tarangire National Park, a destination renowned as much for its beautiful scenery as for its wildlife. Tarangire is a landscape of enormous baobab trees and meandering rivers, home to large elephant herds as well as big cats and more unusual animals such as the Masai giraffe and oryx antelope. You enjoy an extensive game drive in the park before driving the short distance to Lake Burunge Tented Camp for a night. Your suite has solar-powered electricity to top up any batteries you may need to charge and a comfortable bed swathed in mosquito netting.

The road climbs north and you watch as the Tarangire’s dry plains give way to the green rolling hills of the Rift Valley Highlands. The Ngorongoro Farm House is your accommodation for the night, an elegant lodge set on a 500-acre coffee estate. There may be time for a tour of the plantations or you can make the most of the swimming pool at the lodge to simply relax after the drive.

Make sure you have recharged your camera batteries at the lodge because today begins with Big 5 game viewing in the Ngorongoro Crater and ends at a tented camp in the central Serengeti. The steep-walled Ngorongoro Crater is a neatly-packaged microcosm of the East African savannah. Home to antelope, zebra and wildebeest, it is also where you find the Big 5 – lion, leopard, rhino, elephant and buffalo – as well as hippos and flamingos. You enjoy a picnic lunch in the crater before travelling to the Serengeti, game viewing on the way before arriving at Kati Kati Tented Camp and checking in for two nights.

Located on the path of the migrating wildebeest herds, Kati Kati is well placed during Migration season but such is the richness of the resident wildlife that it does not matter what time of year you visit for excellent game viewing. A morning and afternoon game drive are scheduled and there is also an opportunity to book a hot-air balloon safari, taking off at dawn and sailing across the savannah before landing next to a champagne breakfast table. Replacing the morning game drive, this activity is optional and should be booked in advance. 

It is an early start to the day but there is plenty of wildlife to see on your way out of the Serengeti and onto the world’s second largest lake and Africa’s biggest, Lake Victoria. Its fertile shoreline has resulted in a well-populated, agricultural landscape and this is your chance to see a social side to Tanzania and how local people live. Chat to the lake’s fishermen and perhaps visit a local school with your guide before checking in at Speke Bay Lodge, its comfortable chalets set in a hundred hectares of private savannah on the south-eastern edge of the lake close to the Serengeti.

After breakfast at the lodge there is an opportunity to experience something not usually included on safari itineraries: together with a guide, you join local fishermen and head off on a canoe trip on Lake Victoria to witness the traditional way of fishing. Back on dry land, it is time to buckle up for the longest drive of the tour, the journey across the border and into Kenya. You change both driver-guide and vehicle at the border before carrying on to the Masai Mara and checking in for the night at Mara West, a luxurious tented camp adjacent to the national reserve.

The next two days are devoted to the Masai Mara. Based at Ashnil Mara Camp for two nights, you have prime position on the Mara River which, during Migration Season, is the scene of the famous river crossings when thousands of wildebeest brave the river’s crocodiles as they cross from one side to the other. The area’s wildlife is diverse and abundant at all times of year and it is one of the best places in Africa to see big cats like lions, leopards and cheetahs. At camp you have a swimming pool to use as well as Wi-Fi and a breakfast table that looks out over a hippo pool; in the evenings you have traditional Maasai songs to listen to, riddles to solve and dance steps to try – the complete Maasai experience!