The Mara River

Your driver-guide meets you at Kilimanjaro International Airport and gives you a short introduction to the trip. It is about an hour’s drive west to Arusha, past coffee and banana farms on the lower slopes of Mount Meru.

The rest of the day is yours. Have a swim, book a massage or simply sleep off the flight. The safari starts after breakfast tomorrow.

After breakfast you climb through the forest to the Ngorongoro rim and drop down to the Serengeti plains. The drive to the central Serengeti takes about four hours, with game on the way and a stop at Naabi Hill for the park entry.

The Seronera Valley has water all year, so it holds lions, leopards and cheetahs even when the migration has gone north. In the afternoon your guide works the river and the kopjes, the granite outcrops where lions like to lie in the sun.

You spend the whole day around Kogatende and the Mara River. The herds bunch up on the bank, sometimes for hours, then one animal jumps and thousands follow through the current. Big crocodiles wait below, and lions and hyenas stay close.

Your guide keeps in touch with other guides by radio and moves you to wherever the herds are building. Lunch is a picnic, so you never have to leave a promising spot.

You game-drive out of the Serengeti in the morning and cross the plains to the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, about three hours. On the way you pass Maasai herders with their cattle and the short-grass plains where the herds spend the rainy season.

In the afternoon you climb to your lodge on the crater highlands. The air is cool at over 2,000 metres, and in the evening you can sit by a fire and look over the crater you’ll drive into tomorrow.

It is about 30 minutes down the escarpment to Lake Manyara National Park. You start in the groundwater forest, full of baboons and blue monkeys, then come out onto the lake shore under the steep wall of the Rift Valley.

Look for elephants in the forest, the lions that sometimes rest up in the acacias, and flamingos and pelicans on the lake. After a picnic lunch you drive about three hours back to Arusha for your last night.