Per person, land only. Park fees included where noted.
Day 1: Arusha to Tarangire, roughly two hours. Tarangire is the baobab park — enormous, ancient trees scattered across rolling ground, and in the dry season it holds one of the densest elephant concentrations in Africa. Herds of several hundred are not unusual around the Tarangire River, which is the only permanent water for a long way in any direction.
That is the key to understanding this park: between roughly July and October, everything comes to the river. Outside those months the animals disperse and it is quieter but greener. Afternoon game drive, overnight near the park.
Day 2: Lake Manyara. A small park with an unusually broad range of habitat in a short distance — groundwater forest at the entrance fed by springs off the Rift escarpment, then open floodplain, then the alkaline lake itself.
The forest holds blue monkey and troops of baboon, often very large ones. Manyara is famous for tree-climbing lions and they do occur here, though anyone who guarantees them is selling you something — they are seen irregularly. Flamingo numbers on the lake swing wildly with water levels.
The Rift wall rises several hundred metres directly behind the lake and gives the park its shape. Afternoon transfer up to the Ngorongoro highlands, overnight on the rim.
Day 3: Crater descent at dawn. The floor is 260 square kilometres inside walls 600 metres high, and it holds around 25,000 large animals — lion, elephant bulls with heavy ivory, buffalo, hippo, and one of Tanzania’s last black rhino populations, usually seen at distance. Flamingo on Lake Magadi when conditions suit. Picnic lunch at the hippo pool.
Afternoon: on to the Serengeti, entering through Naabi Hill Gate as the plains open up.
Day 4: A full day in the central Serengeti. Seronera — high lion density, leopard along the riverine acacia, cheetah on the open ground, and the kopjes where the cats lie up through the heat. The migration position depends on the month and we will tell you honestly where the herds should be for your dates.
Day 5: Morning game drive, then the drive back to Arusha, arriving late afternoon. Optionally fly out from Seronera to save most of the day.
Why five days: this is the shortest itinerary that covers all four northern parks properly — and they are genuinely four different environments, not four versions of the same thing. Anything shorter means dropping one, and Tarangire and Manyara are the ones usually dropped, which is a shame because they are the quiet ones.
Why the circuit exists at all
The route you are driving is roughly the one Oscar Baumann mapped in 1892 — the Austrian cartographer was the first European to record Lake Manyara, Lake Eyasi, Ndutu and the Ngorongoro Crater, on a single expedition through Maasai country. The Maasai had been there for well over two centuries already.
What turned it into a protected circuit was hunting, and then a film.
An American, Stewart Edward White, camped near Seronera for three months in the 1920s; he and his companions shot around fifty lions. Lion numbers on the plains fell noticeably, and the British administration responded with a partial game reserve in 1921, a full one in 1929, and the Serengeti National Park in 1951.
Then in 1959 Bernhard and Michael Grzimek released Serengeti Shall Not Die, which won an Academy Award and made this landscape internationally famous. Their aerial surveys — Michael was flying one when he was killed, aged 24 — produced the first real data on where the migration actually went, and those findings were used to redraw the park boundaries.
The same year, the Maasai were moved out of the Serengeti into the Ngorongoro Conservation Area. That decision is still argued about, and you will meet people on this trip with strong views on it in both directions. It is worth knowing that the emptiness of the plains you are admiring is partly administrative, not only natural.