Destinations
Five parks within a day's drive of Arusha, and no two of them alike. Here is what each one gives you and when it is at its best.
Endless plains and the Great Migration
The world's largest intact volcanic caldera
Baobabs, big elephant herds and quiet tracks
Groundwater forest, flamingos and tree-climbing lions
Mount Meru, Momella lakes and walking safaris
The Serengeti is the reason most travellers come to Tanzania. Nearly 15,000 km² of open plain, kopjes and river woodland hosting the largest land-mammal migration on earth.
A 600-metre-deep caldera holding roughly 25,000 large animals in 260 km² — the single highest chance of seeing the Big Five in one morning anywhere in Africa.
Tarangire is the elephant park. In the dry season the river becomes the only water for miles and herds of a hundred or more gather along it, under baobabs a thousand years old.
A narrow strip of park squeezed between the Rift Valley escarpment and a shallow soda lake — dense, green and completely different from the open plains.
Twenty minutes from town, at the foot of Mount Meru: forest, crater grassland and alkaline lakes, and one of the few Tanzanian parks where you can walk with a ranger.
