family safari Tanzania with Kids Safari

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1 Tanzania with Kids Safari family safari DAY 1 TRAVEL DAY INTERNATIONAL FLIGHT DAY 2 LAKE DULUTI LODGE ARUSHA Family Safaris with Deeper Africa From aardvark to zebra, our family safaris create a rich learning experience for young people and everyone lucky enough to travel with them. Our guides are parents themselves, and are experts in experiential learning. This is education at its most fun. Your safari guide is at once a teacher, translator, and a tracker. He ll keep you safe, comfortable, and entertained throughout your entire journey. Pickup at Kilimanjaro Airport by Deeper Africa guide after clearing customs. He will have a sign with your name on it. Your guide will transport you to Lake Duluti Lodge. Even though your lodge is well appointed and comfortable, note that it is built in traditional Tanzanian style with individual bomas ( homesteads ) clustered together. There is time today to adjust to the rhythms of life in Africa and life in the natural world. Overnight at Lake Duluti Lodge. Swimming pool available. TANZANIA WITH KIDS

2 DAY 3 LAKE DULUTI LODGE ARUSHA NATIONAL PARK Arise with the birds, or when you wish, and enjoy a nourishing breakfast. Begin your wildlife viewing in Arusha National Park which contains both savannah and forest ecosystems. Your game drive today can be as long as you like. You set your wildlife viewing schedule with your guide to fit the pace that is most comfortable for your family. We will have a picnic lunch for you to take into the park. Arusha National Park is rich in herd animals and interesting birds. There are elephants in the park. You may even have sightings of the rare colobus money in the forest ecosystem. After lunch in the park you ll meet up with your canoe guides for a late afternoon canoe safari on the Momela Lakes. You all get the opportunity to learn about the nearby Meru volcano exploding and creating the unique alkaline environment on the Momela Lakes. While you are canoeing you ll see hippos and flamingos in the lake. Buffaloes, elephants, and other herd animals frequently move to the lakes to graze. Your Land Cruiser is equipped with a set of reference books so that when you identify a new animal, information and pictures are at your fingertips to supplement your guide s insights. You ll also have a full set of maps in your vehicle. During daily orientations your guide will use the maps to show you where you re going and where you ve been. Dinner and overnight at Lake Duluti Lodge. Swimming pool. TANZANIA WITH KIDS

3 DAY 4 LAKE DULUTI LODGE ARUSHA Breakfast at Lake Duluti Lodge. Your guide will meet up with you after breakfast. Today offers a unique opportunity to experience a day of primary school in Tanzania. The teachers and children at Makurima Primary School have a special program planned for you today. It s a day that will change the way you think about Africa and the challenges that the children of Africa face. We ll have a picnic lunch for you at the school with dinner at Lake Duluti Lodge. Swimming pool. TANZANIA WITH KIDS

4 DAY 5 TARANGIRE TREE TOPS TARANGIRE NATIONAL PARK Breakfast at Lake Duluti Lodge. Drive out after breakfast to Tarangire National Park. Get ready to enter a wilderness full of elephants as you wildlife view on your way to Tarangire Tree Tops. Tarangire is famous for elephants. It boasts one of the largest and most conspicuous elephant populations in East Africa. Between the Tarangire River and the southern swamps there is ample water year round to grow food for these huge creatures. Elephants eat 220 to 440 pounds (100 to 200 kgs) a day, depending on their size. You ll observe unique elephant behavior along the Tarangire River when many elephant families gather together. The greetings and low rumblings make it seem as if they re having a family reunion. Spend several hours surrounded by the herds and you sense their wisdom on the breeze. Elephants live in close knit family groups and you ll be able to watch them as long as you choose so you can learn as much as possible about their daily activities. Enjoy watching the young ones play. Your Land Cruiser is equipped with a set of reference books so that when you identify a new animal, information and pictures are at your fingertips. You ll also have a full set of maps so that your guide can show you where you re going and where you ve been. Tarangire Tree Tops allows your family to experience real life in the bush with unique, comfortable, and upscale accommodations in a tree house high in the baobabs. Your guide and the staff at Tarangire Tree Tops will welcome you into camp where you will find good food prepared as your family prefers. Lunch, dinner, and overnight at Tarangire Tree Tops. Swimming pool. TANZANIA WITH KIDS

5 DAY 6 TARANGIRE TREE TOPS TARANGIRE NATIONAL PARK Breakfast at Tarangire Tree Tops. Schedule your wildlife viewing today as you choose with your guide. Now your learning opportunities shift to spotting and tracking skills. While wildlife can never be scheduled, the marsh ecosystem along the Tarangire River often attracts a variety of wildlife and many birds. Tarangire is famous for its giant baobab trees. They have massive trunks with crooked branches that give them otherworldly appearances. Baobabs live at least 600 years with carbon dating suggesting some can live at least 1,000 years. Local people subscribe mystical qualities to baobabs because they have such a long life. Ancient things have wisdom. Tarangire is Tanzania s sixth largest park, but it is not just about elephants and baobab trees. The park has a range of different habitats from grassland and woods in the north to low hills, scrub, and swamplands in the south. This mix of habitat is incredibly diverse and not found anywhere else in northern Tanzania. This means a great deal of different kinds of animals for viewing. In Tarangire you will never go without seeing zebra, wildebeest, water buck, warthogs, giraffe, dik diks, Thompson s gazelle, buffalo, hartebeest, baboons, and vervet monkeys. The big cats, particularly lions and leopard love the large spaces and hidden places created by the rolling savannah. You do not see cheetah in Tarangire because the rolling hills do not allow them the speed they need to hunt their prey. Lunch, dinner, and overnight at Tarangire Tree Top. Swimming pool. TANZANIA WITH KIDS

6 DAY 7 NGORONGORO CRATER SERENA NGORONGORO CONSERVATION AREA Breakfast at Tarangire Tree Tops. Pack up and begin the drive into the Ngorongoro Conservation Area with your wildlife viewing continuing as you leave Tarangire. You ll stop in Mto Wa Mbu village, near Lake Manyara for a local village lunch. Enjoy a variety of traditional Tanzanian dishes with great commentary about the proper time for eaching each dish. After lunch, one of the villagers will join you to take you on a walk through his village, showing you local farms, a kindergarten, local homes, the market, and milling machines. By late afternoon you ll begin the climb up to Ngorongoro Crater. As you enter the Ngoronogoro Conservation Area you will begin to see Maasai enkangs ( homesteads ). The Maasai enjoy special land use in the Conservation Area which allows them to live their traditional pastoral lifestyle, coexisting amongst the wildlife. There is substantial wildlife in the Conservation Area so your cultural views will be mixed with wildlife observation. Note the changes in vegetation as you begin the climb up the slopes of the Ngorongoro Crater. The savannahs disappear into lush, more tropical vegetation, including vast coffee plantations. Dinner and overnight at Ngorongoro Crater Serena. TANZANIA WITH KIDS

7 DAY 8 NGORONGORO CRATER SERENA NGORONGORO CONSERVATION AREA Breakfast at Crater Serena. Ngoronogoro National Park begins on the Crater Rim and the vast exploded caldera is at the bottom of the Crater. Even though it is park land the Maasai are still allowed to graze their cattle in the Crater because they have ancestral rights to this land. You will often see young herders and their cattle moving in the morning and evening hours. Arise early this morning so you can drive into the Crater through the amazing cloud forest that forms on the upper slopes of the Crater. This is an expansive environment inside an extinct volcano. The view from the Crater Rim is spectacular so stop at one of the view points after you reach the Crater rim at 7,500 feet (2,286 meters). The Crater floor is mostly grasslands, so wildlife visibility is excellent, providing a wonderful opportunity for photography. Zebra, wildebeest, and gazelle mingle together, while herds of buffalo graze the long grass areas. Bull elephants and rhino are often seen feeding in green marshes and there are plenty of hyenas. Hippos lounge in the water holes and it is not uncommon to see lions. We ll have a picnic lunch for you in the Crater. Dinner and overnight at Ngorongoro Crater Serena. 7

8 DAY 9 DUNIA CAMP SERENGETI NATIONAL PARK Breakfast at Crater Serena Lodge and then head out for the drive to Serengeti National Park. Picnic lunch at Oldupai Gorge while you stop to visit the famous Leakey digs. The Rift Valley was home to the first humans and the Leakey family has successfully excavated some of the oldest humanoid skeletons ever discovered. Many people believe that Oldupai is the birth place of humanity. The resident anthropologist will tell you all about the amazing discoveries made at the bottom of the gorge by the Leakeys and you can view the first footprints of man in the onsite museum. Once you enter the Serengeti you will begin wildlife viewing traveling the distance to your wilderness camp. In the Maasai language, the word Serengeti means endless plain. This vast savannah grassland extends northward into the Maasai Mara in Kenya for over one thousand square miles of land, forming one of the world s largest wildlife refuges. This is land as it was in the beginning; no fences, no settlements, just a perennial migration of wildlife. In a journey that reaches back through time, these herds of animals (currently estimated at 1.25 million) follow the seasonal rains - traveling from the Serengeti into the Mara instinctually moving with the seasonal rainfalls, sometimes migrating as much as 300 miles a year. Wildlife is allowed to roam freely across the Kenyan and Tanzanian borders, uniting the two parks into a single ecological unit that supports the largest concentration of large mammals on the planet. You ll arrive at Dunia Camp near the end of the day. Sundowners, dinner, and overnight at Dunia Camp. TANZANIA WITH KIDS

9 DAY 10 DUNIA CAMP SERENGETI NATIONAL PARK Your wildlife viewing schedule is set to your family s needs each day with your guide with wildlife viewing available from 6 am to 6 pm. Dunia Camp is in the Seronera area of the Serengeti. The permanent water in the Seronera River means this is a wildlife rich area. You ll journey today to the Singing Rocks which are ancient painted stones that make a clear bell like tone when struck. The Maasai used these rocks to talk to their ancestors. The annual migration is what makes the Serengeti famous. The herds gather on the Tanzanian side of the ecosystem from sometime in November or December through early July. The migration includes vast herds of wildebeest, but also zebra and Thomson s gazelle. The herds steadily move southward through April or May when the seasonal rains cause them to turn and begin the journey back northward toward the Maasai Mara. Wildebeest are well suited to harvest the short grasses that cover the semiarid plains of the Serengeti. The soils of this region have an underlying hard pan covered by a fertile layer of volcanic soil. Grass growing in this soil is highly nutritious taking up nutrients trapped by the hard pan. Amazing star watching at night including clear views of the Milky Way. Breakfast, lunch, sundowners, and dinner at Dunia Camp. TANZANIA WITH KIDS

10 DAY 11 DUNIA CAMP SERENGETI NATIONAL PARK You ll be scouting for cheetah in one of the two remaining cheetah strongholds in the world: the Mara/Serengeti ecosystem. The Serengeti savannahs, with their open country and grasslands, support a healthy cheetah population. Cheetahs face increasing pressure from humans and land encroachment - with between 9,000 to 12,000 left in the world. Lion prides in the Serengeti are territorial. Females within a lion pride are related to each other. Daughters, mothers, grandmothers, aunts, and nieces live together for up to 15 years - the typical lifespan of a lioness. Males are forced to leave the pride at between two to three years of age. When not attached to a pride, lions are nomadic, occasionally banding together with other male cousins or brothers. You will cross through a number of pride territories during your Serengeti travels. During migration season, the lions prosper with sufficient food to feed all of the pride members. But once the herds migrate north into Kenya, the resident wildlife becomes the prime target; territory and hunting skills become the means of survival. Breakfast, lunch, sundowners, and overnight at Dunia TANZANIA WITH KIDS

11 DAY 12 LAKE DULUTI LODGE ARUSHA Breakfast at Dunia Camp. Morning wildlife viewing as you travel to the Seronera bush strip for your late morning bush flight to Arusha. Say goodbye to your Deeper Africa guide at the airstrip, as he needs to drive the Land Cruiser to Arusha. Your guide will have your plane ticket for you. The pilot will assist you in getting checked in and getting your luggage boarded on the plane. Bush Flight: Depart Serengeti bush 10:15 am Arrive Arusha 12:15 pm Pickup by Deeper Africa driver at the Arusha Airport. You ll have lunch at River House hosted by the Shanga Project. Check out the great work that is going on at Shanga Project at Time for craft shopping or shopping in Arusha town after lunch. Dayroom and dinner at the Lake Duluti Lodge. Evening transfer to international airport for your departing flight. Swimming pool. DAY 13 INTERNATIONAL TRAVEL INTERNATIONAL FLIGHT TANZANIA WITH KIDS

12 ADDITIONAL SAFARI INFORMATION INCLUDED IN YOUR SAFARI Full board accommodations in all lodges and tented camps All meals Unlimited game drives in private 4x4 safari Land Cruisers All park and entrance fees Experienced and professional safari naturalist guides Natural Learning program Enrollment with Flying Doctors Evacuation Service All in-country transportation Laundry available at some lodges and camps Beverages in your 4x4 safari vehicle Bottled water available at all times Extensive pre-departure briefing and materials including health information, reading list and map Schedule as you wish January through April, June through December CUSTOM DEP ARTURE D ATES Schedule as you wish January through March, June through December C U S T O M D E P A R T U R E D A T E S 6 persons $8,049 USD per person 2-4 persons $9,199 USD per person Children 12 to 16 years $5,699 Children under 12 years $4,549 Single Supplement $1,649 *Prices based on high season pricing. Call us about green season and peak season pricing. Arrivals and departures out of Kilimanjaro International Airport. Prices do not include international air travel. EXCLUDED FROM YOUR SAFAR I Alcohol and some beverages in some camps and lodges Gratuities We plan your wildlife adventures in areas where wildlife habitats are known to exist for the season and time you are traveling. Still, animals in the areas you are viewing are not in a zoo. They run freely, and we cannot always anticipate their movements. Also, Deeper Africa uses best efforts to provide the lodging set out in this itinerary, but occasionally there are circumstances that occur in East Africa that require lodging substitutions. We reserve the right to make comparable lodging substitutions whenever necessary. TANZANIA WITH KIDS