3-Day Serengeti Safari

Arusha to Serengeti

Pickup in Arusha: Your driver-guide meets you at your hotel, Land Cruiser loaded and ready. This is the moment the trip actually begins, everything before it was just planning.

Ngorongoro Highlands: The road climbs into cool, misty highland forest. A short stop at the crater viewpoint gives you your first look down into the caldera, and most guests go quiet for a moment here.

Descent into the Serengeti: The highlands fall away behind you and the plains open up: this is the "Serengeti" the Maasai named for its endlessness. Lunch is a picnic with a view most restaurants can't match.

First game drive: You'll reach camp by way of the bush, not the road, on an afternoon game drive that has produced more first-day lion sightings than we can count. Slowly, camp comes into view.

Camp, dinner, first night under canvas: Settle into your tent before dark. Dinner is served under the stars, and somewhere out there, the Serengeti is already awake. You'll likely fall asleep to it.

Full day, Serengeti Central

Sunrise game drive: The best hour of any safari day. Predators that hunted overnight are still out, the light is soft and gold, and the Seronera plains, the highest predator density in Africa, start to move.

Breakfast in the bush: A table is set wherever the morning finds you, sometimes with a view of grazing zebra. It is, without exception, the best breakfast setting our guests have ever had.

Full-day exploration: The rest of the day is unhurried: your guide reads the radio chatter and the tracks in the dirt to decide where to go next. This is when the Serengeti stops being a place you visit and starts being a place you experience.

Packed lunch, wherever you are: No rushing back to camp. Lunch comes to you, under an acacia tree, with the plains stretching in every direction.

Dinner under the stars: Back at camp, the campfire is lit and the stories from the day get told and retold. Ask your guide about the Serengeti's name, "endless plains" in Maasai, and why it has earned every syllable of it.

Ngorongoro Crater to Arusha

Early departure: A pre-dawn start is worth it today. Breakfast is packed, and you'll be on the road while the Serengeti is still waking up around you.

Crater rim, first light: The view from the rim gives almost everyone goosebumps, and not just from the cold at 2,300 metres. Below you, 264 km² of caldera holds one of the densest concentrations of wildlife on Earth.

Descent to the crater floor: The track winds down to 1,700 metres. This is your best chance in Tanzania to see black rhino, alongside lion, elephant and the herds of zebra and wildebeest that never leave the crater floor.

Picnic lunch, crater floor: Lunch is taken with the crater walls rising all around you, one of the more surreal dining rooms you'll ever sit in.

Climb out, drive to Arusha: The exit from the crater is as spectacular as the entrance, so take a last look back. From here, it's a few hours' drive back to Arusha, arriving in the late afternoon with three days of stories to tell.