11-Day Safari Tanzania + Zanzibar
FROM $2,800.00 USD* / BIG FIVE ENCOUNTERS / 11 DAYS
* Indicative costs per person, excluding international airline tickets
Photo by Hu Chen
Serengeti, Ngorongoro, Tarangire — the parks everyone comes for. We won’t pretend they’re undiscovered. What changes the trip is timing and routing, and a guide who works these ecosystems year-round.
Eleven days, private vehicle, no convoy departures. Elephant herds under Tarangire’s baobabs, open plains in the Serengeti, then five days on Zanzibar to let it settle.
Every booking funds biodiversity and research work with our partner projects in Tanzania. You get the parks. The parks get something back.
Price
April - May
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2 persons
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4 persons: $2,300.00 USD*
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6 persons: $2,100.00 USD*
Rest Of The Year
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2 persons
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4 persons: $2,500.00 USD*
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6 persons: $2,300.00 USD*
July - September
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2 persons
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4 persons: $2,700.00 USD*
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6 persons: $2,500.00 USD*
Included
- All accomodations
- 24/7 service
- English-speaking guide
- Game drives
- Pickup and transfer from/to airport
- Park and crater fees
- Full board during safari
- Reservation costs
Excluded
- Visas
- Travel insurance
- International flights
Route
Itinarary
Day 1: Arrival at Kilimanjaro International Airport
You land at Kilimanjaro International. Somewhere past the baggage hall, your guide is waiting — Tanzanian, and someone who works these parks year-round rather than reading them off a card. Karibu Tanzania. Short transfer to the hotel, and the rest of the day is yours to do nothing with.
Photo by Stephan Bechert
Day 2: Tarangire National Park
Baobabs and elephants, and the two are connected. In the dry months the Tarangire River is the only running water for a long way in any direction, so the herds come to it — sometimes several hundred animals in a single stretch of valley, alongside everything else that needs to drink.
The baobabs tell the other half of that story. Some of them are centuries old, and many carry deep scars where elephants have stripped the trunk to get at the moist fibre underneath. It’s a hard thing to look at once you understand it: a record of how dry this landscape gets, written into the trees.
Your guide will point out which scars are old and which are from this season. That’s the difference the day makes.
Photo by Florian Müllerrt
Day 3-4: Serengeti National Park (central west/east)
Two full days, which is what the Serengeti actually needs. One day gets you a drive through it. Two gets you a morning and an evening — the hours when the plains are doing something.
The park holds the largest lion population anywhere in Africa, and central Serengeti is where the density is highest: resident prides, kopjes they return to, cheetah on the open ground, leopard in the riverine trees if the light and the luck hold. We won’t give you a checklist. Your guide will tell you honestly what’s likely this week and what isn’t.
On the Migration: it moves. Whether the herds are in this part of the park depends entirely on when you travel, and we’ll tell you before you book rather than after. Roughly May to July puts the central and western corridor in the path. Outside that window, the Serengeti is still worth two days — just for different reasons.
Photo by Jorge Tung
Day 5: Ngorongoro Conservation Area (incl. Crater)
The largest intact volcanic caldera on earth, and the only place on this itinerary where we’ll tell you in advance about the traffic.
The crater floor takes a fixed number of vehicles and a fixed number of hours, and most operators descend at the same time on the same morning. We go early or we go late, and we accept a shorter window in exchange for a floor that isn’t full. If your guide suggests waiting an hour, there’s a reason.
What’s down there justifies the discipline: around 250 square kilometres of grassland, swamp and soda lake with resident lion prides, elephant bulls carrying tusks you won’t see elsewhere, and one of the last populations of black rhino in northern Tanzania — a couple of dozen animals, usually far off, occasionally not. If you see one, understand what you’re looking at.
Ngorongoro is also not a park. Maasai families graze cattle inside the conservation area under an arrangement that has been contested for decades. Ask your guide about it. It’s a more interesting conversation than the animals.
Photo by Mwandwe Chileshe
Day 6: Flight to Zanzibar (included in the price)
A short flight east, included in your price. You’ll leave the highlands in the morning and be at sea level by lunch — the temperature change is the thing people underestimate.
One practical note: domestic flights here run a soft-bag allowance of roughly 15kg. Pack accordingly, or leave a case with us in Arusha and collect it on the way home. We’ll confirm the exact limit with your ticket.
Our guide meets you at the airport and gets you to the coast. Nothing is scheduled after that.
A word about what’s here. Zanzibar is beaches and reefs, and it’s also Stone Town — which grew as the centre of the East African slave trade, and where the plantations, the architecture and the spice economy all trace back to it. We think that’s worth knowing before you arrive rather than being surprised by it in a museum. The next three days are yours; if you want that history properly guided, tell us and we’ll arrange someone who does it well.
Photo by David Cashbaugh
Day 7-9: Zanzibar
Three days on the coast, and how you use them is largely up to you. Most people want one day of history, one on the water, and one that stays empty.
Stone Town takes a morning — the merchant houses, the market, the former slave market site — and it’s worth doing with a guide who handles that history properly rather than walking it alone. The spice farms inland pair naturally with it.
A day on the water is the other obvious one. Dhow trips run out to the southern sandbanks for swimming and snorkelling; if you dive, the reefs off Mnemba are the better use of the day. Both move with the tide, so timing gets set locally rather than in advance.
Beyond that: kitesurfing on the east coast when the wind is up, or Jozani forest for the red colobus, found nowhere else on earth. Or none of it. After five days of early starts, plenty of people spend the last one horizontal, and we won’t sell you an itinerary to fill the gap.
Photo by Aron Marinelli
Day 10-11: Departure (from Zanzibar)
Check-out is late morning, but the beach doesn’t close. Depending on your flight, there’s usually time for a last swim or a slow breakfast before the transfer.
Zanzibar’s airport is small and the international departures run mostly in the evening, so we’ll get you there with margin rather than optimism. Day 11 is the flight itself — most routes home go overnight and land the following morning.
Before you go. A share of what you paid for this trip goes to the biodiversity and community work we run in Tanzania. We’ll send you a note afterwards telling you what it went to — not a brochure, just where the money landed. It seems only right that you know.
If you’d rather not leave yet, Pemba and Mafia are both a short hop away and both quieter than the main island. Say the word and we’ll extend it.
Photo by Aron Marinelli