Serengeti National Park

The Serengeti is not one place but four, and understanding that is the difference between a good safari and a wasted week. The park runs roughly 150 kilometres north to south, and where the wildebeest and zebra are in any given month decides where you should sleep. Choose the wrong sector in the wrong month and you can be a full day's drive from the spectacle you came for.

The southern plains around Ndutu are short-grass calving grounds, at their most extraordinary from December to March. The central Serengeti, Seronera, holds permanent water and therefore resident game all year — the safest choice for a short trip. The western corridor, following the Grumeti River towards Lake Victoria, carries the herds and the first river crossings around May and June. The north, Kogatende and the Mara River, is where the crossings happen from roughly July to October and where the northern Serengeti quietly becomes outstanding big-cat country.

Away from the migration, the Serengeti is one of Africa's greatest predator ecosystems. Around three thousand lions live here. Leopards work the sausage trees along the Seronera river. Cheetah hunt the open grass in the south-east. Spotted hyena clans number in the hundreds, and the granite kopjes — inselbergs weathered out of the plain — act as natural stages for all of it.

The name comes from the Maasai siringet, the place where the land runs on forever. Standing on the southern plains in February, with the grass cropped to a lawn and the horizon uninterrupted in every direction, it is not a poetic description. It is simply accurate.

Practically: the park is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, entered from Naabi Hill in the south-east or by scheduled flight to one of a dozen airstrips. Most itineraries combine two sectors, and the strongest ones fly at least one leg rather than losing a day on the road.