7 Days Combined Kenya and Tanzania Private Safari

Your Ziwaland Holidays guide meets you at the airport or your hotel for breakfast and a full briefing on the days ahead. You then head southwest, stopping at the Great Rift Valley escarpment viewpoint where the floor drops away below you, and again in Narok for lunch. An afternoon game drive starts the safari properly on arrival, followed by dinner and overnight at your lodge or camp.

A full day in the reserve with a picnic lunch carried with you. The Mara is rolling savannah cut by a dense network of tracks, which is why it is the most reliable place in Kenya for close-range big cat viewing; lion, cheetah and leopard are all resident and untroubled by vehicles. Lunch is taken at Hippo Pool, where the pods lie up in the shallows and crocodiles bask along the banks. Dinner and overnight at the lodge.

An early morning balloon flight over the reserve can be arranged at additional cost.

The morning takes in a Maasai homestead before you turn for the Isebania border with lunch en route. Your Kenyan guide hands over at the crossing; once immigration formalities are complete you continue with your Tanzanian guide into the Serengeti, game viewing as you go. Dinner and overnight at your camp or lodge.

A full day across the plains with picnic lunches in the vehicle. Beyond the resident lion, leopard and cheetah, this is good country for the animals most people miss: spotted hyena working in clans, the serval hunting rodents in long grass, and the aardwolf, an insect specialist that lives almost entirely on termites. Dinner and overnight at your lodge or campsite.

A final Serengeti game drive this morning, then the road climbs east into the Ngorongoro Conservation Area with a packed lunch on the way. You arrive at the crater rim in the evening, and it is worth stepping out for the view down onto the floor before dinner and overnight.

You descend around 600 metres to the crater floor for the morning. Lion, elephant, buffalo, hippo, flamingo and a small protected population of black rhino all live inside the caldera walls, which is what makes this one of the most productive single game drives in East Africa. Picnic lunch inside the crater, then back up the rim road and on to Arusha for the night.

After breakfast you transfer to the shuttle terminal for the morning departure north. The road crosses back at Namanga and reaches Nairobi in the afternoon, with a drop at your hotel or the airport.