A walking safari in Serengeti National Park, built around a camp that travels with its guests. Days are spent on foot with a specialist guide and an armed ranger, and the walk ends wherever it ends, at lightweight tents under a canvas flysheet, pitched that afternoon well away from any vehicle track. When the group moves on, nothing marks that the camp was ever there.
Time is marked by the sun’s position, not a watch.
Walking is the whole point, not an add-on to a vehicle safari. Guests set their own pace across granite kopjes and acacia plains, stopping to read tracks in the dust, alarm calls in the trees and the wind on their faces. Time is marked by the sun’s position, not a watch. No roads, no cars, no other people: vision, hearing and smell all sharpen within the first hour of walking.
The camp is honest about what it is: small dome tents of mosquito gauze, camp beds with real mattresses and linen, a bucket shower filled from the fire. No plumbing, no sockets, no engine noise. Dinner is cooked over coals and eaten under the open sky by firelight. Hyenas whoop somewhere in the dark; lions answer at a distance. It makes no claim to being a lodge.
Hyenas whoop somewhere in the dark; lions answer at a distance.
Alex Walker founded the operation and still walks these routes when he is in camp, with specialist guides Chris Stamper, John Moller and Adrian Allen. Walking inside the park requires an armed ranger, so the group moves in single file behind guide, ranger and tracker. On the southern plains, Hadzabe and Ndorobo trackers join the walk, sharing methods that predate the safari industry by generations.
Between mid-June and mid-November, camp works the Lamai Wedge, the country between the Mara River and the Kenyan border, where wildebeest cross and crocodiles wait beneath the banks. Camp also works the short-grass plains in the south, on the wildebeest calving grounds. Cheetahs hunt these plains in the calving season.
A day’s walking is paced by whoever in the group is walking slowest, and the long stops are built in rather than tolerated. A leopard’s print pressed into dust beside a hyena’s, a termite mound doubling as a lookout post, dung beetles rolling their loads across the path: this is the ground-level detail that a vehicle simply drives past. Oxpecker chatter overhead can mean something is sleeping in the grass ahead. Buffalo announce themselves on the wind before they are ever seen.
Oxpecker chatter overhead can mean something is sleeping in the grass ahead.
Adventure Flycamping works best bookended by nights at one of Serian’s permanent camps. Those camps have proper beds, en-suite bathrooms and hosted dinners at a candlelit table, giving orientation on arrival and hot water and laundry on the way out. Off-road driving is permitted from the southern camp inside the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, but not within Serengeti National Park, where game drives keep to daylight hours and designated roads. Access is by light aircraft, into Kogatende in the north or Mwiba in the south.
Time on foot suits travellers content without plumbing, who want their wildlife encounters without other vehicles nearby. Evenings settle into the same rhythm: hot bucket water at dusk, a fire, a hearty dinner, and a flysheet tied back so the mesh roof frames the stars. In the south, walks with Hadzabe hunter-gatherers add bow-making, honey-collecting and medicinal-plant knowledge to the day. Physical ability to walk for several hours daily matters more here than in a vehicle-based safari, and children under twelve are not permitted on the walks themselves.
accommodation
Sleeping is in lightweight tents with mesh walls and a canvas flysheet, pitched fresh each afternoon: a camp bed with a real mattress, linen and a duvet, a bucket shower and a short-drop loo behind a screen. The permanent camps used before and after Adventure Flycamping have six and eight tents, with en-suite bathrooms.
activities
Multi-day walking with a specialist guide, tracker and armed ranger is the core of Adventure Flycamping. Kopje climbs, foot tracking and time spent with Hadzabe hunter-gatherers in the southern plains fill the days. From the base camps, private game drives, hot-air ballooning and birdwatching are available. Minimum age for the walking safaris is twelve.
conservation
Serian is affiliated with the Serengeti De-snaring Programme, a joint effort with Tanzania National Parks and the Frankfurt Zoological Society to clear snares from the ecosystem. Near the southern camp, Serian has refurbished the local school's classroom. Most camp staff are employed locally.
Get in touch and let’s start the conversation. An initial consultation helps us understand what you’re looking for, whether that’s specific experiences, luxury touches, or marking a special occasion, and from there we’ll guide you through what’s possible so you can decide if we’re the right fit.
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You walk, and the camp moves with you. A light camp is pitched fresh each night, away from the vehicle tracks, and struck again in the morning, so you are covering ground on foot rather than driving out from a fixed base and returning to it. The days are built around what the guide finds rather than a route agreed in advance.
It changes what you notice. Big animals are seen differently on foot, but so are tracks, dung, birds and the small things a vehicle drives past at speed. It suits people who have done a conventional safari and want the next thing, more than it suits a first trip where seeing a great deal quickly is the point.
You need to be comfortable walking for a few hours in the heat over uneven ground, carrying nothing more than water and a camera. It is not mountaineering, and the pace is set by looking rather than by covering distance, but it is genuinely a walking trip and there is no vehicle waiting round the corner.
Walking safaris in big game country generally carry a minimum age, and it varies by operator and by park, so rather than guess we confirm the current rule for your dates and tell you plainly. Tell us the ages and what everyone is like on their feet, and we will say whether this is the right trip or whether a fixed camp with walks from it would suit you better.
By light aircraft into the Serengeti, then by road to the start point, which moves with the camp. The strip depends on where in the park you are walking and on the season, so we confirm it with the operator rather than assume it: from Arusha the flying time to the southern strips is around fifty minutes to an hour, and to the far north around an hour and a half.
The aircraft take soft bags only with a fifteen kilogram limit, which suits this trip anyway. On a walking safari you want less than you think, and laundry is done as you go.
Yes. The UK's official travel health service rates all of Tanzania below 1,800 metres as high risk, Zanzibar included, and recommends antimalarial tablets for it, treating only ground above 1,800 metres as free of risk. The American CDC uses the same altitude line. The Serengeti plains sit at roughly 1,400 to 1,700 metres depending on where you are, so they fall below it rather than above.
We do not give medical advice. We are travel planners rather than doctors, so the choice of tablets, and whether they suit everyone in the party, belongs in a conversation between you and your own doctor or a travel clinic. What we can be useful on is the non-medical part: sleeping under canvas away from a fixed camp makes covering up at dusk and using repellent more worthwhile, not less.
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our approach
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