11-Day High-End Kenya & Tanzania Safari

Nairobi's traffic is left behind within the hour, and then the land simply falls away. The road tips over the edge of the Great Rift Valley and winds down the escarpment, with the valley floor spread out far below and the old volcano of Longonot standing in the middle of it. By early afternoon the gates of Lake Nakuru National Park are in sight.

Nakuru is small, and that is its gift. It does not take long to find buffalo grazing the lake shore and Rothschild's giraffe moving through the yellow barked acacia, and because the whole park is a fenced rhino sanctuary, there is a genuine chance of rhino on the very first drive. The afternoon follows the shoreline as the light softens, and the evening is spent at The Cliff Camp, inside the park, with the lake below.

The road west climbs out of the Rift Valley through farmland and small market towns, then drops toward the Mara, where the fields give way to open grass and the first herds appear beside the track. The destination is the Mara Triangle, the reserve's quieter western corner, walled in by the Oloololo Escarpment on one side and the Mara River on the other. Lunch is at &Beyond Kichwa Tembo Tented Camp.

The first game drive goes out as the heat eases. The Triangle carries some of the highest wildlife densities in the whole Mara, and the plains are rarely empty: topi standing sentry on termite mounds, zebra and wildebeest grazing in loose herds, and more often than not, lions resting somewhere in the long grass. The drive ends as the sun drops behind the escarpment.

The day starts before sunrise, with coffee in the half light and the vehicle rolling out as the sky turns pink over the plains. Early morning is when the Mara is most alive: lions returning from the night's hunt, hyenas trotting back to their dens, and cheetah climbing onto a mound to scan the grass for gazelle.

There is no fixed route. The guide reads the land and follows the animals, and the plan shifts with the season. Between July and October, when the Great Migration is here, the day can be built around the Mara River, where thousands of wildebeest gather on the bank, hesitate, and finally plunge across past the waiting crocodiles. Outside those months, the resident prides, the elephant families and the leopards of the riverine forest fill a long, unhurried day.

A last game drive on the way out of the Mara makes the most of the morning, and then comes the border. The formalities take a little time, but on the far side the land looks almost the same, and that is the point: the Mara and the Serengeti are one ecosystem, divided only by a line on the map, and the Serengeti simply carries it on at a far greater scale.

The afternoon brings the first game drive in Tanzania, from Four Seasons Safari Lodge Serengeti, where a waterhole draws animals within sight of the lodge. It is the base for the next three nights.

The Central Serengeti is the heart of the park, with wildlife here all year round and some of the best big cat country in Tanzania. The drives go out early and cover fresh ground, following whatever the morning reveals: a pride of lions stretched across a sun warmed kopje, a leopard asleep along the branch of a sausage tree in the Seronera valley, or a cheetah walking the open plain in search of a meal.

The herds keep these plains in near constant motion, and the scale of it all, grass running to every horizon, takes a while to sink in. The heat of the middle of the day is spent at the lodge, and the afternoon drive goes back out for the golden light.

The last full day in the Serengeti gives the game drives room to range further. When the great herds of wildebeest and zebra are within reach, the day goes to them: long columns of animals stretching across the plain, the dust, the noise, and the predators never far behind.

When the migration is elsewhere, the day turns to the park's resident hunters and the permanent water that draws everything in, with time to stay longer at a good sighting rather than move on. Back at the lodge, the evening is a fine one for watching the sun set over the plains for the last time.

The road leaves the Serengeti heading east, and the flat plains slowly give way to rising ground until the vehicle is climbing into the Ngorongoro highlands, a world of cloud forest, cool air and old volcanic craters. After three days of heat and dust, the change is startling.

The Highlands Camp sits high on the crater highlands with no fences around it, so the sweeping views and the chill of the altitude arrive the moment the vehicle stops. The evening is spent up there in the quiet, with the descent onto the crater floor saved for the morning.

The descent starts early, the track dropping two thousand feet down the crater wall while mist is still lifting off the floor. Below lies one of the most extraordinary places in Africa: a single enclosed world of grassland, acacia woodland, swamp and soda lake, where lion, elephant, buffalo and hippo live side by side, and the occasional black rhino grazes out in the open.

After the morning game drive the vehicle climbs back out, and the road continues down the escarpment to Lake Manyara. Dinner is at Lake Manyara Kilimamoja Lodge, perched high above the park, with the lake below and the Rift Valley stretching away into the distance.

A long travel day, and a scenic one. The road runs north, back across the border into Kenya, and on to Amboseli National Park at the foot of Mount Kilimanjaro. As the plains open up, the mountain grows larger on the skyline, its snow cap floating above the haze whenever the cloud allows.

The afternoon game drive follows Amboseli's famous elephants across the dry lake bed and out to the green swamps, where they gather to drink and bathe, with Kilimanjaro standing behind almost every view. The night is at Elewana Tortilis Camp Amboseli.

Dawn is the moment to be out. Kilimanjaro is usually clearest in the first hours, and the sight of it turning pink above the plains, with elephants walking beneath, is one of the defining images of an African safari. The morning drive covers the swamps, the dry lake bed and the acacia woodland, where buffalo, giraffe and a wealth of birdlife share the ground with some of the most closely studied elephant families in the world.

The heat of the middle of the day is spent back at camp. The second drive goes out as the light and the temperature soften into late afternoon, when the herds walk back from the swamps and the mountain often clears one more time.

A last breakfast with the mountain in view, weather permitting, and a relaxed final morning at camp. After lunch, the road runs north across the Maasai plains toward Nairobi, and the safari comes to a close in the city, eleven days and two countries after it began.