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Your driver-guide is waiting when you come out of Kilimanjaro International Airport. After a short welcome and a look at the week ahead, you drive about an hour west to Arusha.

Tonight is spent at a coffee-estate lodge or a small private house on the edge of town. There is nothing to do but rest, have dinner and sleep off the flight.

The Maasai called this place Siringet, the place where the land runs on forever. You reach it by climbing over the forested crater rim and dropping down onto the short-grass plains, where the horizon really does seem to have no end.

The drive takes about four hours, and your guide will stop for whatever is out there: gazelles, ostriches, a cheetah on a termite mound. After lunch at Naabi Hill you continue to the central Serengeti and your camp, set away from the busier roads around Seronera.

A last morning drive takes you out of the Serengeti the way you came, across the southern plains. Past Naabi Hill you enter the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, where Maasai families still graze their cattle and goats alongside zebra and giraffe.

The road climbs to the crater rim, and you stop at the viewpoint for your first look down into the caldera you will explore tomorrow. You reach your lodge in Karatu by mid-afternoon, with time to rest after three days of early starts.

After breakfast you drive down the escarpment to Lake Manyara National Park, a narrow strip of forest, grassland and lake squeezed under the wall of the Rift Valley. Troops of baboons and blue monkeys live in the forest at the gate, and elephants feed in the mahogany and fig trees.

Out by the water you’ll see hippos, pelicans and, in some months, pink lines of flamingos. Keep an eye on the acacias too, where Manyara’s lions sometimes climb. After a picnic lunch you drive about three hours back to Arusha, where the tour ends.