7-Day Grumeti Migration Safari

Picked up at eight for the drive across the Great Rift Valley and a full day in Lake Manyara. It is a small park with a lot in it: lush acacia forest, giant figs and mahoganies, and a growing population of baboons and blue monkeys.

Giraffe, elephant, impala, buffalo and hippo all live here, and the drives along the shore are lovely to photograph. If you would rather swap this day for Tarangire, or add a day and do both, just say.

A very early start and down onto the crater floor for a morning in one of the most striking places on earth. The crater runs to about 260 square kilometres inside walls six hundred metres high, and almost everything indigenous to East Africa lives down there.

It is one of the rare places you might see black rhino. There is a river, swamps, a soda lake with flamingos, forest and open plains, and elephants carrying some of the heaviest ivory left anywhere.

An early breakfast and the drive to the Serengeti. It is long and it is spectacular, and seeing the plains for the first time is a moment most people remember.

This is the home of the migration: two million wildebeest, hundreds of thousands of zebra, and every kind of antelope, plus the lion, cheetah, leopard and hyena that follow them.

A whole day in the park, arranged however you like it. Two drives with lunch and a rest in between, or one long day with a picnic — your guide will talk it through with you the evening before.

West across the plains into the corridor that follows the Grumeti, game driving through country most visitors never reach.

Two nights out here is what gives the river a real chance.

A full day around Kirawira. Resident wildlife is unusually dense here — lion prides of up to thirty are not unknown — and from May to June the migration turns the area into something else again.

The Grumeti is the feature, and the herds sometimes cross it. Please take this in the spirit it is meant: finding a crossing is difficult and often comes down to luck. A herd can stand at the river and decide not to cross for another two days.

One more very early game drive, which is the best hour of the day and a good last one, then on to the airstrip for the flight back to Arusha.

Flight timings depend on the pilot's route that day, so we keep the morning flexible.