Motorcycle Safari Tanzania

Thirteen nights across Tanzania, half on a motorcycle and half in a 4×4, which is the sensible arrangement for a country where the best wildlife areas do not allow bikes. The hire is included, on a Honda CRF.

Arusha opens it, then West Kilimanjaro across plains leased from Maasai communities for wildlife, the Pare Mountains and Same, and the Lushoto highlands in the Usambaras, where Mambo village sits at 2,300 metres and the forest is old enough to hold species found nowhere else.

The Maasai Steppe and the Tarangire-Manyara ecosystem follow, with a 4×4 game drive in Tarangire, then Lake Eyasi and a visit to the Hadza, who still hunt with bows and speak a click language unrelated to any other. Lake Natron comes next below Ol Doinyo Lengai, an active volcano that erupts a lava unlike any other on earth, with flamingo colonies on the lake and the Ngaresero waterfall nearby.

The Serengeti follows with game drives and a luxury camp, then Olduvai Gorge, where the Leakeys found hominin remains that pushed human origins back by a million years and which is still called the cradle of mankind, and the Ngorongoro Crater, a collapsed caldera holding black rhino among a great deal else. Arusha closes the loop. Prices are quoted in US dollars, and no wildlife sighting can be promised, though the crater is about as close to a sure thing as Africa offers. The split format is the distinguishing feature: the riding days cover country that safari itineraries drive straight through, and the 4×4 days reach the parks where motorcycles are not permitted at all.