Arusha National Park

Arusha National Park is the one every itinerary skips and every guide privately loves. It sits barely forty minutes from Kilimanjaro International Airport, wrapped around the eastern flank of Mount Meru, and it packs more habitat into 550 square kilometres than parks ten times its size. In a single morning you can move through cloud forest hung with lichen, out onto the grassy floor of an extinct crater, and down to a chain of alkaline lakes where flamingo stand in water the colour of pewter, with Kilimanjaro floating on the horizon beyond.

What makes it unusual is not just the scenery but what you are allowed to do. Because there are no lion or rhino here, the park permits activities the great game parks cannot. You can walk with an armed ranger through forest and along the crater rim. You can canoe on the Small Momella Lake, drifting past waterbuck at the shoreline, buffalo grazing in the shallows and giraffe silhouetted on the ridge behind — the only canoe safari in northern Tanzania. You can climb Mount Meru itself, a serious three- or four-day trek up an active stratovolcano that many climbers rate more beautiful than Kilimanjaro and use as acclimatisation for it.

The forest is the park's soul. This is proper montane rainforest, dense and dripping, and it holds the black-and-white colobus monkey in numbers seen almost nowhere else in northern Tanzania — extraordinary animals with long white capes and plumed tails that leap between crowns with a flourish that never gets old. Blue monkeys chatter in the understorey. Trogons, turacos and the hammer-blow call of the silvery-cheeked hornbill fill the canopy. The Ngurdoto Crater, a smaller cousin of Ngorongoro often called the 'Little Ngorongoro', drops away beneath viewpoints on the rim; visitors cannot descend, which means the buffalo, warthog and baboon on the floor are watched from above, undisturbed.

North of the forest, the Momella Lakes are shallow, alkaline, and each a slightly different colour thanks to differing mineral content. Flamingo gather here, along with an exceptional cast of waterbirds. Giraffe are everywhere and remarkably relaxed — Arusha has one of the highest giraffe densities in Tanzania. Bushbuck, waterbuck, reedbuck, dik-dik, warthog and buffalo are common; leopard and spotted hyena are present but rarely seen.

Above it all is Meru. At 4,562 metres it is Tanzania's second highest mountain and Africa's fifth, and its collapsed eastern side gives it a dramatic horseshoe profile with the Ash Cone sitting inside the caldera. The Momella Route to the summit is a genuinely beautiful climb — through forest with giraffe on the lower slopes, along Rhino Ridge, up the knife-edge crater rim to Socialist Peak for a sunrise that puts Kilimanjaro directly in front of you across the plain. Most climbers use it as a four-day acclimatisation trek before Kilimanjaro; a good few come away preferring it.

For luxury travellers, Arusha National Park solves two problems elegantly. It turns an arrival or departure day — usually dead time — into a genuine wildlife experience. And it offers walking and canoeing at the start of a safari, so that by the time you reach the Serengeti you have already had your feet on the ground and your hands in the water. Add a coffee-farm lunch on the slopes below the park, and it is one of the most civilised days in northern Tanzania.