Tanzania · The Calendar
The herds cross the Mara in one window. The calves drop in another. The Old Fort fills with music for four nights in February. These are the fixed points in Tanzania's year — and the itineraries we build around each of them.
08 events on the calendar
Month by month
Pick the month you can travel and see what is happening in it. Several of the best windows overlap — February holds calving season, two festivals and the marathon.
Feb
06Apr
00Quiet month — good value, fewer vehicles.
May
00Quiet month — good value, fewer vehicles.
Wildlife events
June to October
Between June and October roughly two million wildebeest, zebra and gazelle push north through the Serengeti and pile up at the Mara River. We camp where the herds actually are and move as they move.
January to March
On the short-grass plains around Ndutu the wildebeest drop nearly half a million calves inside a few weeks. It is the most concentrated wildlife spectacle in Africa and the best big-cat action of the year.
October to February
Between October and February juvenile whale sharks feed in the shallow plankton-rich water off Mafia. Snorkelling is from small boats with researcher-set rules — no touching, no chasing, no scuba.
Festivals
February
East Africa's warmest music festival: taarab, bongo flava, reggae and Afrobeat across four nights in the Old Fort, with Stone Town spilling out around it.
Culture & ceremony
Early February
Our own gathering around Bob Marley's birthday: Nyabinghi drumming and chanting, an ital feast cooked over fire, and roots reggae into the night — held in Arusha and again in Stone Town.
Late July
Zanzibar's oldest festival, kept in the village of Makunduchi: ritual mock fights with banana stalks to clear the year's quarrels, a hut burned to carry off misfortune, then singing, food and open houses.
Races
Late February
Full marathon, half and 5km through the coffee country below Kilimanjaro. We handle Moshi logistics, race-week acclimatisation, and the safari or summit climb that follows.
Moon windows
Year-round, one window a month
Time your climb so summit night falls on the full moon: the glacier walls glow, the crater rim is visible without a torch, and sunrise arrives with the moon still setting behind you.
Tell us the window you can travel in and we will tell you honestly what is happening in it — and what to see instead if the timing is wrong.