tanzania: luxury serengeti

On the right dates yes, but the two places this route touches the herds are roughly half a year apart.

Mwiba lies on the southern boundary of the Serengeti, and from about January to March the wildebeest gather on the short-grass plains beyond it to calve, with the middle of February the peak of the births. Grumeti sits in the western corridor, where the herds usually mass around June before pressing north.

So a January to March trip is built around calving and a mid-year one around the corridor, and the months in between put the animals somewhere else entirely. Timing follows the rain and moves from one year to the next, so nobody can pin it to a week.

The rest of the route does not depend on the herds at all: Burunge, Mwiba and Grumeti all hold resident game through the year.

Less than is often implied, and the real differences are worth knowing before you pay for them.

Night driving is the clearest. Tanzania's park authority licenses drives after dark in Tarangire, Lake Manyara, Ruaha, Katavi and Nyerere among others, and not in the Serengeti, so a night drive on the reserve at Mwiba is doing something the park on its boundary cannot.

Walking is the one people get wrong. The national parks do allow it, with an armed ranger, a park fee and a minimum age of twelve, so on a private reserve the difference is freedom rather than permission: no ranger to book, no fixed hours, and the walk can start at the tent.

The third is the vehicle. Every booking at Mwiba comes with its own guide and 4x4, which means no shared timetable and no queue behind anyone else's plan.

Not likely, and no stay here should be sold on it.

Nine critically endangered Eastern black rhino were moved to the western Serengeti in 2019, the largest single relocation and reintroduction of the subspecies, and they joined one female already living in a protection zone of about 276 hectares.

That is a founder population being rebuilt under guard and close monitoring, not a herd laid on for visitors. The reserve runs to 350,000 acres and the animals are very few, so finding one is luck rather than planning.

If black rhino are the reason you are travelling, the Ngorongoro Crater is the stronger bet in northern Tanzania and we can add a night on the rim. What these three nights do reliably hold is lion, leopard, cheetah, buffalo and elephant.

A morning out foraging at their pace, not a display put on at a set hour.

The Hadza are one of the last hunter-gatherer peoples in East Africa, living around the Lake Eyasi basin and the neighbouring Serengeti plateau. A 2015 estimate put their number at between 1,200 and 1,300, with only around a third still living entirely by foraging, and their language is related to no other.

On the walk the men usually go out with bows for small game and for honey, following honeyguide birds to wild bees' nests, while the women dig tubers and gather berries and greens with digging sticks.

Expect a few hours on rough ground, a lot of watching and waiting, and little commentary beyond what your guide translates. It is offered as part of a stay at Mwiba, so tell us if you would rather leave it out.

Two windows, and they answer different questions.

July to October tops our ratings everywhere on this route: dry air, thin bush, the big Tarangire herds back at the river and game easy to find on all three reserves.

January and February are the other. The calving happens on the plains beyond Mwiba, with February the height of the births, and Burunge is green and quiet then.

June is a useful in-between month, drier than the green weeks and quieter than August, though Tarangire and the Serengeti still have some way to go.

The stretch to avoid is the long rains from March to May, which we rate as the weakest almost everywhere on this route: the Burunge lodge closes from early April to the middle of May, and Tarangire's game scatters once there is water everywhere.

As the sample route is written you travel in open 4x4s, and two of the legs are long days on the ground.

Arusha out to the Burunge concession is the short one. From there the route runs south-west to Mwiba and then north-west to Grumeti, on the far side of the Serengeti, and both of those are full days by road.

All three reserves have their own airstrips, so we can fly either leg as a change to the route: Arusha or Kilimanjaro to Mwiba is usually forty-five minutes to an hour depending on how many strips the aircraft calls at, with about fifteen minutes by game drive to the lodge.

Scheduled light aircraft here work to a 15 kilogram limit per person, hand luggage inside it, in soft bags. We can put a private charter on any of them, normally a Grand Caravan or a Pilatus PC-12.