Ngorongoro Crater Lodge is perched on the edge of the world-famous Ngorongoro Crater at the eastern edge of the Serengeti in northern Tanzania. It lies within the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, which covers more than 8 000 square kilometres (3 100 square miles) of pristine wildernessof Africa. Inspired in design by the Maasai mud-and-stick manyatta (homestead), Ngorongoro Crater Lodge is without doubt one of the most architecturally spectacular safari lodges in Africa.

Why Ngorongoro Crater lodge?

• Famous Ngorongoro Crater – a World Heritage Site
• Three intimate safari camps with breathtaking views
• Spectacular year-round game viewing
• Interpretive Big Five safaris
• Nearby Olduvai Gorge and Shifting Sands
• Private butler service

Stretching for 50 km along the base of the rusty-gold 600-metre high Rift Valley escarpment, Lake Manyara is a scenic gem, with a setting extolled by Ernest Hemingway as “the loveliest I had seen in Africa”.

The compact game-viewing circuit through Manyara offers a virtual microcosm of the Tanzanian safari experience to see so much wildlife.

From the entrance gate, the road winds through an expanse of lush jungle-like groundwater forest where hundred-strong baboon troops lounge nonchalantly along the roadside, blue monkeys scamper nimbly between the ancient mahogany trees, dainty bushbuck tread warily through the shadows and outsized forest hornbills honk cacophonously in the high canopy. There is an amazing number of water birds.

Tarangire National Park covers 2600 sq km of grassland and floodplains, and a large proportion of tall acacia woodland just south of the large open grass plains of southern Maasailand.

Tarangire Wildlife and Migration patterns
During these months the concentration of animals around the Tarangire river is almost as diverse and reliable as in the Ngorongoro Crater, but the ecosystem here is balanced by a localised migration pattern that is followed by most animals other than lion, who don't tend to abandon their territory.

The animals mostly disperse during April and May, when there is widespread greenery, vegetation and standing water to encourage all the grazers further afield. In June, the eland and oryxes begin to return, followed by elephant towards the end of the month. Tarangire is a great spot for elephant gatherings at the end of the rainy season in June, and zebra and wildebeest return together through July.

By mid-August all the animals are congregating around their last reliable water source, the Tarangire River. The calving season falls in the early months of the year, through January, February and March, and so makes the most of the fresh grass during the rainy season.