Plantation Lodge occupies a former coffee farm just outside Karatu village, roughly halfway between Lake Manyara and the Ngorongoro Crater and about two and a half hours from Arusha. The accommodation is distributed through terraced gardens as white colonial-style buildings, with a pool at the lower end of the garden overlooking the valley, a wine cellar and a curio shop. Much of the produce used in the kitchen is grown on site. It is a drive-in property rather than a safari camp: guests arrive with their own guide and vehicle, and the lodge provides accommodation rather than game activities. Coffee tours, Karatu village visits, spa treatments and trips to Lake Eyasi are arranged locally.
What sets it apart
It is a garden estate rather than a safari property, used as a staging point on the road between Manyara and the crater.
Who it suits
Overnight stops en route to Ngorongoro; gardens and food; self-drive and guided road itineraries.
The essentials
| Country | Tanzania |
| Where | Karatu, in the Ngorongoro highlands between Lake Manyara and the Ngorongoro Crater |
| Property type | lodge (garden estate) |
| Rooms | 16 double rooms, some convertible to triples, plus a honeymoon suite and a group house containing four double suites (per Go2Africa). Tanzania Odyssey confirms the property but gives no count, and the lodge's own site would not load for me. |
What it costs
No rate is published on the property's own site. Third-party reseller range only, not an official published rate: "$863 per person" per https://www.tanzaniaodyssey.com/tanzania/plantation-lodge, as listed September 2026.
A reseller's range tells you the bracket, not the price you would pay. We show it because it is the only public figure that exists, and we label it rather than present it as the property's own.
About the photographs
The pictures on this page are stock photographs of African bush and desert country, chosen to suggest the kind of landscape you find around the Ngorongoro highlands of northern Tanzania. They are not photographs of this property, and we cannot verify where any of them was taken — a stock library records the photographer, not the place. We use them rather than borrow the property's own marketing images, which would imply we had been there. For pictures of the rooms, see the property's own site.