Serengeti & Ngorongoro: Following the Herds
A safari sold on the name of a park is a safari sold on a guess. The herds are on the southern short-grass plains for calving in February, in the western corridor by June, and on the Mara River in August. We book the camp for the month, not the month for the camp.
The camps are mobile: ten tents, bucket showers, moved four times a year to stay with the animals. Clients trade a swimming pool for waking up inside the event, which is the trade almost everyone is glad to have made by the second morning.
Ngorongoro answers the other half of the brief. The crater floor holds resident game year-round, including the black rhino that are hard to find anywhere else in the country, and it works whatever month the migration is having.
Transfer to a coffee farm above Arusha, and an early night before the drive west.
South to the baobab country of Tarangire, where the elephant herds concentrate along the river in the dry months.
A walking safari at dawn with an armed ranger, tracking on the ground, then a long siesta and an evening drive.
The climb to 2,300 metres, a Maasai boma visited on the community’s own terms, and the first look down into Ngorongoro.
Down the descent road at opening for the resident lion, hippo and black rhino, with a picnic beside the Ngoitokitok spring.
West through Olduvai to the plains, reaching the mobile camp wherever the herds have put it this season.
A full day out with a packed breakfast, following whatever the guide’s radio and the vultures suggest.
A balloon at first light over the grass, breakfast on the ground where it lands, and an afternoon on the kopjes.
The light aircraft from the airstrip to Kilimanjaro or Zanzibar, for the flight home or a week on the coast.
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