The Tanzania Safari Collection

The Northern Circuit — the Serengeti, Ngorongoro Crater, and Tarangire — is where Tanzania safari experiences begin and end for most travellers. Not because there is nothing else, but because it offers everything that makes Tanzania the finest safari destination in Africa: the Great Migration, the highest predator density on the continent, landscapes of extraordinary beauty, and infrastructure — camps, guides, logistics — that has been refined over decades.

Within the Northern Circuit, there are distinct characters. The Serengeti is vast and various — the central valley for resident wildlife and leopards, the western corridor for the Grumeti crossings, the northern Mara area for the river crossings and the migration herds. Ngorongoro Crater is a different proposition entirely: 264 square kilometres of caldera floor where 25,000 large animals live in one of the world's most productive ecosystems. Tarangire is quieter, more intimate, and often the most unexpectedly romantic of the three parks.

A Northern Circuit safari with Bobby is private by definition. Your vehicle, your guide, your itinerary. We do not run group tours. We do not share camps. And we will tell you honestly which parks and which areas are right for what you want to experience — not which ones are most convenient for us.

Adjacent to the Serengeti and Ngorongoro are private conservancies — land managed by individual camps or community trusts, with their own rules and their own access policies. The key differences from a national park safari are significant: no other vehicles at sightings, night game drives, guided walking safaris, and off-road approaches to wildlife. The camps in conservancies are smaller — typically six to twenty tents — and the experience is qualitatively different from anything available in the national parks.

For guests who want a safari that is genuinely private — who want to experience wildlife without the queues and the vehicle numbers — a conservancy experience is the answer. It costs more, and it delivers more. The guides in private conservancies are often extraordinary: people who have grown up in the bush, who know individual animals by name, and who bring a depth of knowledge that transforms a game drive into something closer to a private lecture in natural history.

We work with a small number of conservancy camps that we know intimately and trust completely. Not all conservancies are equal — some are primarily marketing operations with thin substance. We only recommend the ones where the experience is genuine.

Tanzania's Southern Circuit — Ruaha National Park, Nyerere National Park (formerly Selous), and the Mahale Mountains — receives a fraction of the visitors of the Northern Circuit, and it shows. The landscapes are wilder, the feel is more remote, and the wildlife encounters have a quality of intimacy that the busy northern parks cannot match. Ruaha alone has one of the largest populations of African wild dogs in Africa.

The Southern Circuit requires more time — we recommend a minimum of seven to ten days to do it justice — and it is typically fly-in, given the distances involved. The camps are fewer and more exclusive, the Guiding is often more personal because the ratio of guides to guests is lower, and the experience is fundamentally different from the Northern Circuit. For guests who have already done the Serengeti and want something genuinely wild, or for those who have the time to do Tanzania properly, the Southern Circuit is extraordinary.

The combination of a Tanzania safari and Zanzibar is one of the great journeys of the world. After four, five, six days in the bush — the early mornings, the extraordinary sightings, the long evenings with a gin and tonic watching the sun go down — the turquoise waters and white sand of Zanzibar feel like a different planet. And in some ways they are: the Swahili culture of Zanzibar, Stone Town's centuries of Indian Ocean history, and the reefs that surround the archipelago are genuinely different from anything on the mainland.

A ninety-minute flight from the Serengeti or Ngorongoro takes you to Zanzibar. We work with a small number of beach partners who meet our standards for privacy, character, and genuine hospitality. The beach extension is not an afterthought — it is a deliberate tonal shift, a chance to process the safari experience and arrive home rested rather than exhausted.