Safari Timeless Wilderness

We drive onward to Tarangire National Park and the Tarangire Sopa Lodge, a classic example of beautifully designed modern lodge architecture.

Tarangire is an apt place to begin a wildlife safari. Home to just about all the headliner beasts, including a large and robust elephant population, Tarangire also shelters such rarities as the fringe-eared oryx and the long-necked gerenuk, a particularly winsome and creatively constructed antelope. Tarangire charms us with its exemplary African landscapes: acacia trees, brawny brown hills, sweeping vistas, clear nights of “soft velvet,” as Elspeth Huxley wrote. “[Like] a warm conservancy whose great dome was encrusted with all the diamonds in the world, and all the scents in the world were there too, changing like currents in the sea.”

• Accommodation;
• Tarangire sopa lodge

And we’ll game drive and view-catch at Lake Manyara, which our guy Ernest Hemingway thought “the loveliest lake in Africa.” The lake is a birder’s heaven, (it’s frequented by 300 migratory species), and the water from its Crater Highlands–supplied springs makes it a forested redoubt for all the most glamourous large mammals, including the famed Manyara tree-climbing lions. (It’s a little irreverent, but  tree-lounging might be a better description.

Staying at Manor at Ngorongoro

We drive to our base for the next one night, the lovely Cape Dutch style cottages and suites of the Manor at Ngorongoro, set mellifluously in an Arabica coffee estate next to the Ngorongoro Conservation Area. And then we’ll wend our scenic way up from the Manor to the rim of one of earth’s wonders, the great, green, animal-nurturing caldera of a once catastrophically cranky, now beneficently mellow volcano, the Ngorongoro.

We’re at Vail and Aspen altitudes of well over 7,000 feet, and being up that high, figuratively and actually, we may recall Isak Dinesen’s words in Out of Africa, “The air of the African highlands went to my head like wine, I was all the time slightly drunk with it.” And then we zoom down to the Lost World’s lush and park-like floor (but which, make no mistake, is an animal, not a human, kingdom) for a day’s game viewing and a festive bush picnic.

End of safari with us