14-Day East Africa Perennial Safari

After the long flight, a private transfer is waiting at Jomo Kenyatta International, and the drive continues to the hotel. The rest of the day asks nothing at all: time to rest, adjust to the altitude and the hour, and sleep well before the flight north. Dinner is arranged independently.

The morning starts at Wilson Airport, Nairobi's small airfield for bush flights, and the short flight north crosses the equator with Mount Kenya often visible off the wing. Below, the green highlands turn to the red earth and doum palms of Samburu, country that belongs to the north alone, and so does its wildlife: Grevy's zebra, reticulated giraffe, and the long necked gerenuk, which feeds standing upright on its hind legs.

Lunch is taken on arrival. The first game drive follows as the afternoon light turns gold, along the Ewaso Ng'iro River, where elephant come down to drink.

Samburu rewards patience more than distance, so the day is shaped around its two best windows: the drive at dawn, while the air is cool and the predators are active, and the drive late in the day, when the heat breaks and the river fills with animals again. The hours in between belong to the camp.

The reserve is home to species that live only in Kenya's dry north, the so-called Samburu Special Five among them: Grevy's zebra, reticulated giraffe, Somali ostrich, beisa oryx and gerenuk. Leopard are seen here more often than most people expect.

Another short flight, this one south, trades Samburu's ochre plains for the deep grass of the Maasai Mara, and the difference is obvious from the air long before landing. Arrival comes in time for lunch at camp.

The first game drive follows in the afternoon, onto plains carrying one of the highest concentrations of predators in Africa. On the Mara, lions are rarely a question of if, only of where.

Three nights in one camp allow the Mara to be seen properly, and this first full day is timed around the animals rather than the clock: out early while the cats are moving, back for lunch and a rest through the heat, out again for the evening.

Rolling plains, lines of trees marking the rivers, and in season, wildebeest massing at the crossing points: this is the landscape that built East Africa's reputation as safari country in the first place. The migration keeps its own timetable, and the guide follows it.

By the second full day the guide knows where the prides were resting, which cheetah was hunting and where the herds were heading, and can go back to them as the light and the animals shift. That is why a second day in one place is so often the better one.

Big cats hold the short grass here in every season, so the day follows whatever the plains offer that morning. The evening is the third and last at camp.

One last look at the Mara on an early game drive, and then the flight south, routed through Wilson and Kilimanjaro airports into Tanzania. It is a travel day, and a long one, but it ends somewhere worth the effort.

The southern Serengeti is reached by late afternoon: open plains rolling to the horizon, much quieter than the plains further north, and the start of three nights at camp.

The first thing that registers is the scale. The southern plains run flat and open to every horizon, broken only by granite outcrops and the odd stand of acacia, and the sky takes up most of the view.

This is a part of the Serengeti most visitors never reach, and its distance from the main circuit keeps the game drives uncrowded. Between December and March the wildebeest herds gather to calve on these short grass plains, and the predators follow close behind.

The kopjes are the focus of the second full day: granite outcrops that rise from the grass like islands. They hold water after rain, shade in the heat and a clear view in every direction, which is exactly why the resident lions and leopards use them as lookouts.

Between drives there is time at camp, and the evening, the last of three, comes with the particular silence of a place a long way from anywhere.

The road climbs off the plains toward the Ngorongoro highlands, with wildlife viewing along the way, and the air cools as the altitude rises. Lunch comes before the main event: the descent onto the crater floor.

Down there, inside a caldera whose walls rise two thousand feet, lives one of the densest concentrations of wildlife on earth: lion, buffalo, black rhino, hippo, and great herds of zebra and wildebeest. The vehicle climbs back to the rim at the end of the afternoon, for the first of two nights at the lodge.

First light brings the second descent, ahead of most vehicles, when the low sun turns the grass gold and mist can still be lifting off the crater floor. Lions are often still on the move at that hour, and in the right season the soda lake is lined with flamingos.

Morning is when the crater is at its best, so the afternoon is left free for the lodge and its grounds, with the view down into the caldera changing by the hour. The evening is the second on the rim.

Down off the highlands, the road runs east to Tarangire National Park, arriving in time for lunch. The landscape changes completely: dry, open woodland scattered with baobabs, many of them centuries old, their huge grey trunks scarred where elephants have stripped the bark.

The afternoon game drive follows those elephants, and there are a great many of them. Tarangire holds some of the largest concentrations in Tanzania, and the herds are rarely far from the river.

Tarangire moves at a slower pace than the plains further west, and a full day here makes the most of it. The Tarangire River is the park's lifeline through the dry months, and wildlife is drawn toward it from far around: elephant, zebra, wildebeest, buffalo, and the lions that follow them.

The drives run morning and afternoon, the baobabs making every scene look ancient. The evening is the last of the safari, back at camp.

Tanzania is left by air, on a flight from Kilimanjaro back to Nairobi. A day room is waiting there, at a hotel such as Ole Sereni, so the hours before the evening departure go to a shower, some rest and a final repack rather than a terminal seat.

An evening transfer to the airport connects with the onward international flight.