Flying to the Serengeti, and how else you get there

Friends of ours were coming to Tanzania and the plan was four days in the Serengeti. Then the plan fell apart, the way plans do, over the one thing nobody thinks about in advance.

Driving there takes two days, and they did not have two days. They were on the point of cancelling the Serengeti altogether when somebody said the word flying. From Kilimanjaro Airport it is a little over two hours.

I should say here that I am afraid of flying. A thirteen-seat aircraft over the savanna was not the solution I had been hoping somebody would come up with.

Two days by road, barely two hours in the air

From Moshi to the Serengeti by road is two days with a night somewhere in the middle. You go past Tarangire, you climb up over the Ngorongoro and you come into the park across the ground, and if you have the time that is the better way to arrive. You watch the country change under you instead of flying over it.

They did not have the time. The flight from Kilimanjaro Airport puts you on an airstrip in the middle of the park in just over two hours, which buys back two travelling days. On a ten-day trip that is a fifth of the holiday.

The aircraft, a Cessna Caravan with thirteen seats

What we got into at Kilimanjaro Airport was a Cessna C208 Grand Caravan. Thirteen seats, one propeller on the nose, and you sit close enough behind the pilot to read his instruments if you want to, which I did not.

The first surprise was that it does not fly direct. These flights work like a bus route and stop at other airstrips on the way, so somebody who was braced for one take-off and one landing is in fact looking at three of each.

The first stop, Arusha Airport

We got out at Arusha, because the pilot had reached the end of his duty hours. From there we carried on in a second aircraft of the same type.

A young woman came to collect us and walked us across the hot apron to the aircraft that was waiting. I assumed she was ground crew. Then she climbed in, took the controls and talked us through what was about to happen, and I had to sit with the fact that I had made an assumption I am not proud of, at eight in the morning, in front of nobody but myself.

She took off, and half an hour later she put us down at Lake Manyara.

The second stop, taking off from Lake Manyara

Landing at Lake Manyara is one thing. Taking off from it is another.

The runway runs downhill like a ski jump. The aircraft gathers speed, and at the end of the strip the ground simply stops being there. There is no room left in that moment for being afraid of anything, which turns out to be its own kind of cure.

From up there the lake runs on for miles and the whole landscape goes one even shade of grey-green. The engine is loud and you know the silence underneath it is total, and those two things sit oddly together. The shadow of the aircraft slides across the ground ahead of you. There are herds down there and you cannot tell what they are. Some of them break and run from the noise. Others do not lift their heads.

Then roughly another hour of that, and the Serengeti strip.

Landing in the Serengeti

Before the wheels are down you can see people standing beside the strip in safari hats, and they wave. You wave back while the aircraft is still bumping over the grass, which is not how arrivals usually go.

It turns at the end of the runway and taxis up to a small building. A few Land Cruisers are parked there and a trolley with a fire extinguisher on it. The propeller stops. You step down into the heat and it is quiet.

Then our friends, and the park, and four days of plains in front of them. That evening we sat by the fire at the lodge with more to say than there was evening to say it in.

I would do it again.

What to expect from a flight like this

1. Kilimanjaro Airport to the Serengeti in a little over two hours, against two days by road.
2. The flights almost always stop somewhere, so count on more take-offs and landings than you were expecting.
3. The aircraft is usually a Cessna Caravan, thirteen seats, one propeller, cruising at around 278 km per hour, about 173 miles per hour.
4. Baggage is usually 20 kilos in the hold plus 5 kilos of hand luggage, around 44 and 11 pounds. Some of the smaller flights allow 15 plus 5, about 33 and 11 pounds. Your own allowance is always on your e-ticket, and it is a hard limit, not a guideline.
5. We book the domestic flights as part of your trip and we book the transfer at the other end, so there is nothing for you to arrange at either airstrip.
6. A park airstrip is a strip of grass with a windsock next to it. Your guide is waiting on the other side of it.

When we recommend flying, and when we recommend driving

Flying is not simply better. It costs more than driving, and you lose the road, which on a trip like this is not dead time but part of what you came for.

We recommend flying on short trips where every day has to count, for anyone going on from the northern Serengeti to Zanzibar, because the alternative is a two-day drive back the way you came, and for travellers who find long days in a vehicle hard going. Flying in and out of the northern Serengeti to our own camps is something we do regularly, and it is the one case where the aircraft is not a compromise but the plan.

If you have two weeks and you like driving, we will tell you to drive. Tarangire, then up over the Ngorongoro, then down into the Serengeti across the ground, in that order, and you will understand the country in a way that nobody who flew over it does.

What suits your trip

Whether flying belongs in your route comes down to how many days you have and where you are going afterwards. We work that out while we are building the trip, and when driving is the better answer we say so, even though the flight earns us more.

Safari njema.