Itinerary
Highlights
- Covering, Girrafe Center in Nairobi, Lake Manyara, Tarangire NP, Ngorongoro, Serengeti NP & Masai Mara NP.
- Focus on game activities in East Africa’s most bountiful wildlife areas, emphasizing big herds and their predators.
- A visit to the Olduvai Gorge, where the Leakey family unearthed our ancestor, the 1.75 million year-old fossil Homo habilis.
- Spectacular early evening sundowners, unscripted, familial visits in Maasai villages
- Visit to AmericaShare’s soul-expanding Harambee Centre in Nairobi.
Day 1-2
Explore Nairobi
Relaxation and overnight. Palacina Residences & Suites.After arrival at Jomo Kenyatta Airport, we’ll be met by Zagas Explorer represantative and driven to the classic Palacina & Suite , for more than a century the world’s preferred pre- and post-safari stomping ground. We’ll meet sassy pachyderms at the Daphne Sheldrick elephant orphanage, consort with the world’s tallest terrestrial animal at the Giraffe Centre, make a pilgrimage to the home of Karen Blixen—aka Isak Dinesen, one of Africa’s supreme laureates
Day 3-4
Maasai Mara Game Reserve
Tarangire Sopa LodgeWe’ll tour the informative National Museum and after lunch fly in early afternoon from Nairobi to northern Tanzania’s Kilimanjaro International Airport. We fly onward to Tarangire National Park and the Tarangire Sopa Lodge, a classic example of beautifully designed modern lodge architecture.
Tarangire is an apt place to begin a wildlife safari.
Home to just about all the headliner beasts, including a large and robust elephant population, Tarangire also shelters such rarities as the fringe-eared oryx and the long-necked gerenuk, a particularly winsome and creatively constructed antelope. Tarangire charms us with its exemplary African landscapes: acacia trees, brawny brown hills, sweeping vistas, clear nights of “soft velvet,” as Elspeth Huxley wrote. “ a warm conservancy whose great dome was encrusted with all the diamonds in the world, and all the scents in the world were there too, changing like currents in the sea.”Day 5-6
The Ngorongoro Crater
The Ngorongoro SopaWe drive from Tarangire up into the green Crater Highlands, weaving our way to our lodge, the Ngorongoro Sopa, perched at well over 7,000 feet on the rim of the fabled Ngorongoro Crater.
As geologic masterpieces go, Ngorongoro has had quite a career. It’s been a gigantic peak, perhaps a rival of Kilimanjaro, and, after it blew its snowy top in what must have been a rather impressive explosion (our forefathers over at the nearby Olduvai Gorge, busy getting their humanoid act together, probably saw it), Ngorongoro spent many millennia as an alternately quiet and occasionally bubbling lava lake. Now in an extended pacific mood, the crater is home to upwards of 25,000 personality-rich animals, who roam—as we will—over a sweetly lush area larger than 76 Central Parks.Day 7-8
Serengeti National Park
The Serengeti SopaAfter stopping at Olduvai, the symbolic wellspring of our DNA, we drop down to the Serengeti, the known universe’s largest collection of illustrious mammals: elephants, giraffes, tumbling pool-fulls of hippos, elegantly slinking serval cats, zebras with incredibly muscular haunches (leading us to wonder why they were never ridden— very weak backs, that’s why), and scores of species more, all of them going about their business unconcerned by the likes of us. We’ll soak up the essence of the Serengeti from the Sopa Lodge, set on an escarpment overlooking the seemingly limitless plains, enjoying a sundowner after a game drive, watching clouds build up as the day cools, big clouds that “look like you could scoop them up with a spoon,” Elspeth Huxley wrote.
Day 9-11
Maasai Mara Game Reserve
Kichwa Tembo or Fairmont Mara Safari ClubWe fly back to Kilimanjaro International, then to Nairobi, and on to the Kenyan section of the Serengeti– Maasai Mara ecosystem, a world treasure, one with no counterpart, anywhere. Up here in the system’s north, the landscapes are grandly varied but tend to be more green (which is why the migration heads up here, in search of water), with somewhat less savannah than in the south. We’ll be staying in a characteristically attractive tented camp, either Kichwa Tembo or Fairmont Mara Safari Club, both of which take advantage of the Mara’s scenic mix. Kichwa is set in riverine forest on the banks of the Sabaringo River, and the Mara River nearly wraps around the Mara Safari Club. Both camps offer balloon excursions; wafting over the Mara in the piercingly fresh and golden morning, floating over elephants and hippos, feeling a mild and worthy intoxication-by-grandeur, is one of those things that, having done, we wonder how on earth we ever contemplated not doing.
Day 12
Fly Nairobi, Departure
lunch at the Boma NairobiWe fly back to Nairobi in the morning for some relaxation and maybe a swim or a nice lunch at the Boma Nairobi, as you are waiting for your flights.
