Gems of the North - Festival 2009 Extension

Friday 29th May 2009

Over early morning tea meet with your personal guide and expert. Following breakfast check out of FOW 2009 Camp and set off by road through the Serengeti towards Naabi Gate. The journey by road will take you through the central Seronera valley. This area is characterised by wide-open grassy plains and rock kopjes, connected with a network of rivers. This ensures year-round water supplies keeping this region game rich throughout the year. Continue onwards towards Oldupai and Shifting Sands. Shifting Sands is a remarkable phenomenon these mounds of volcanic ash are the result of wind blowing the ash. As the dust mounds grows in size they begin to shift, resulting in a wonderfully symmetrical crescent shape, whose arms point in the direction of the blowing wind.

From here continue through the gorge where our ancestors walked, arriving at the Oldupai Visitors Centre for a leg stretch and visit to the museum. The site curator gives visitors a brief history of the area which is where the skull of 'Zinjanthropus'- early man - was unearthed. From Oldupai your safari takes you up the Malanja depression towards the crater rim and Crater Lodge.

Designed to stun you feel as though you are entering centre stage at Crater Lodge. The exterior is designed to look like a Maasai manyatta on stilts, a mud and stick construction with thatched roof. The inside is reminiscent of a colonial grand manor house. Beaded chandeliers dangle from the ceiling. Voluptuous silk and velvet curtains dress the windows. The bedroom, sitting room and bathroom of each individual room boast floor to ceiling windows overlooking the crater.

Saturday 30th May 2009

Following breakfast, descend onto the crater floor for a full day game drive.

Often referred to as the "eighth wonder of the world", the Ngorongoro Crater provides one of the finest wildlife experiences Africa can offer. Covering 260 square kilometres the balance of predator and prey within the crater is so precise that animals seldom leave, and it possibly contains the largest permanent concentration of wildlife in Africa, with an estimate of 30,000 large animals.

Game viewing is good all year-round due to a permanent source of fresh water so that the animals don't need to migrate to find water as they do in Serengeti. The expansive floor is predominantly grassland, which provides for excellent game viewing. There are two swamps fed by streams (a favourite for Hippo, Elephant and Reedbuck, among other species) two forests, and a huge soda lake that attracts thousands of flamingos and other water birds. The crater walls themselves are also lightly forested. There is no accommodation on the Ngorongoro Crater floor itself so every day a restricted number of visitors are given permits to descend the 650 metre walls of this caldera (a collapsed cone of a volcano) for half a day. Despite the restrictions on numbers, the popularity of the Crater and its location on the classic 'northern circuit' mean that you will not have a solitary experience here. However, the size of the Crater is such that it is possible to escape the crowds whilst on the crater floor, and the guaranteed sightings and benefits of wildlife-viewing here far outweigh the negatives. Return to the Lodge for afternoon and evening.

Sunday 31st May 2009

Following a leisurely breakfast depart Crater Lodge and continue round the rim through the forest to arrive at the conservation gate. From here continue by road (all tarmac) through the highlands to the top of the rift escarpment, here you will witness spectacular views down into Lake Manyara National Park. Drive down the escarpment and enter Lake Manyara - you will drive through the rich rainforest and on to the lakeshore, squeezed between the looming rift valley wall and the alkaline lake, crossing numerous running streams that tumble down from the Ngorongoro highlands. Arrive at Lake Manyara Tree Lodge. This accommodation at Manyara is in luxury tree houses. It is located in beautiful forest; the only lodge in the park about 45 kms from the main gate. The large rooms are on a wooden platform with a veranda. Some of the rooms are built around existing trees.

Hemingway described Lake Manyara National Park's magnificent hunting country in "The Green Hills of Africa". Mahogany and Sausage Trees are alive with Blue and Vervet monkeys, elephant feed off fallen fruit, while bushbuck, waterbuck, baboons and leopard all make their home in the forest. Manyara is also a sanctuary to hippo, giraffe, impala, zebra, the elusive buffalo and lion. Lake Manyara itself is a magnet for birdlife and a kaleidoscope of different species can be found around its shores, including huge flocks of flamingos.

From the moment you pass through the gate of Lake Manyara National Park, your game viewing will commence. You may be interested to know that a long-term study of elephant by the Iain Douglas Hamilton was instrumental in ensuring the preservation of the African Elephant to ensure this mammal was included on Appendix 1 of CITES.

Monday 1st June 2009

Spend the day in Manyara with morning and afternoon game drives, in the northern reaches of Manyara you are unlikely to see another tourist vehicle. The birdlife is utterly stunning and we hope to be joined by two experts who for the past 25 years have been collating bird data for the eventual publication of the Bird Atlas of Tanzania.

Tuesday 2nd June 2009

Following breakfast, depart Lake Manyara Tree House driving back to the gate and onwards through the town (now booming) of Mto wa Mbu, the red bananas are delicious a non compulsory stop can be arranged! Continue onwards leaving the rift and heading towards the Maasai steppe and Tarangire National Park.

Tarangire National Park, dominated by the Tarangire River is a grossly under-rated park and one of the best-kept secrets in Africa. Perhaps this is because it does not fit so conveniently into a week's safari, or because it lies just off the 'northern circuit'. Whatever the reason, it means that Tarangire is a superb wildlife destination for the enthusiast. The river attracts enormous herds of elephants and the landscape is a rich and varied mix of baobab, acacia bush, plains swamps and rocky outcrops (kopjes). The wildlife here is superb and the area actually experiences its own migration - although smaller in scale than the one witnessed in Serengeti.

Large herds of elephants are virtually guaranteed here, and lion, cheetah, leopard, hyena, jackal hunt the large herds of buffalo as well as Grant's and Thompson's Gazelle, zebra, giraffe and warthog. The area is excellent for birds of prey and provides superb habitats for hundreds of other species.

For our two-night stay in Tarangire we have chosen Oliver's Camp. When Paul Oliver first came to Tarangire in 1985, he found what he had been looking for in his years of travelling through Africa: a wild and unspoilt national park, with an incredible density of mammals. He has since handed over the management to Asilia, but Paul remains involved in conservation and we hope Paul will join us during our stay here.

Oliver's is a small yet beautifully furnished camp. It has just eight tents, with solid wooden furniture, beautiful cloth and gorgeous warm showers that can be taken under the Tarangire sky. Every evening, guests relax or read in the lounge and library tent, or drink sundowners at the fireplace, from which superb views of landscape and sunset can be enjoyed.

Wednesday 3rd June 2009

Spend the day in Tarangire with morning and afternoon game drives.

Thursday 4th June 2009

On this your last day, a leisurely breakfast will be arranged followed by a final game drive. You will return to Olivers to freshen up have lunch, before driving back along the tarmac road to Arusha and onwards to Kilimanjaro Airport to connect with the Kenya Airways flight to Nairobi and home.

Friday 5th June 2009 - Arrive back in the UK.