Arrival in Arusha

A Summit Heroes Expedition representative will meet you at the airport and transport you to your Arusha accommodation, where you will overnight, relax, and prepare for the adventures ahead.

Arusha to Tarangire National Park

After breakfast, you will be picked up from your Arusha lodge by our safari guide, who will greet you with a broad smile in anticipation of our upcoming adventures. We’ll take a good tarmac road to Tarangire, passing through gently rolling Maasai plains with scattered acacia trees. As we speed along, we see many Maasai dressed in bright colors walking along the road, riding bicycles, herding cattle, and driving donkey carts

We’ll certainly arrive in time for a picnic lunch and some rest before continuing on with our afternoon game drive. Tarangire National Park, famous for its large elephant herds, is a diverse landscape of seasonal swamps, savanna, and the park’s life-giving Tarangire River. From the open roof of the vehicle, we’ll look for zebras, wildebeest, buffalo, elephants, and giraffes among the many animals that live in this area. We might see Simba stalking his prey or the leopard relaxing in the trees. We leave the park after an extensive game drive and head to our nearby lodge, where we enjoy dinner and relaxation before returning to our quarters.

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Tarangire to Lake Manyara National Park

After breakfast, we board our car and drive to Lake Manyara National Park, a small but diverse park 120 kilometers west of Arusha. The park, also known as a shallow salt lake, covers roughly 70% of the parklands, floods and dries according to the seasons, and is home to thousands of flamingos and over 500 other bird species. We’ll see monkeys, giraffes, zebras, wildebeest, buffalo, elephants, and, with luck, lions lounging in the trees as we explore the park.

In the afternoon, we’ll stop at one of the designated picnic areas for a picnic lunch while admiring the park’s beauty. After all of the day’s excursions, we’ll return to our lodge for dinner, possibly a digestif by the fire, conversation, and a mental review of the images of the wilds we’ve collected throughout the day before retiring for some well-deserved rest.

Lake Manyara to Ngorongoro Crater to Arusha

We leave our lodge with packed lunch boxes after an early breakfast for a drive through the Rift Valley to the cooler regions of the Ngorongoro highlands. The Ngorongoro Crater, the world’s largest volcanic caldera, formed two to three million years ago by the massive explosion of a volcano once higher than Kilimanjaro. It is nearly 20 km wide and 600 m deep and is known for its diverse wildlife, including the “Big Five”—lion, elephant, buffalo, rhino, and leopard.

It is widely acknowledged as one of the world’s wonders, truly magnificent. Aside from the Big Five, the various springs attract wildebeest, gazelle, reedbuck, and over 500 bird species. We eat our delicious lunch at a picnic site before continuing our game viewing in the crater. We leave the crater in the evening, driving up the steep, winding road to Arusha, our adventure complete and full of images of the African wilderness to last the rest of our days.