kenya & tanzania: the mara to the crater

It helps, and the reason is the rulebook rather than the marketing.

The conservation authority permits driving between 06:00 and 18:00 and shuts the descent gate at 16:00, so the earliest anyone can be down there is fixed by the clock.

A camp in the forest on the rim, close to the descent road, can be at the top of it as driving becomes legal, while a lodge outside the conservation area spends that first hour getting to the gate.

From the rim the road drops about 610 metres onto a floor of some 260 square kilometres. Operators generally plan around six hours below, though there is no such limit.

Expect company all the same: the crater is small, open and popular, and busy all year round.

Good, and better than anywhere else on this trip, though no wild animal can be promised.

Two measures of the odds put them high, one at about seventy per cent and the other simply that black rhino are easily seen here. The population behind those odds is small and nobody agrees on its size, with counts anywhere between twenty-six and fifty-five, so an exact number is worth doubting whoever gives it to you.

Timing helps more than luck: our own advice for the crater is that the dry months thin the grass and shrink the water, which brings the residents into clear view.

Expect them at a distance on open grass, so pack binoculars, and bear in mind that the two nights on the rim buy one descent and therefore one morning of looking.

Because the cheetah there breed, and vehicles were judged to be getting in the way.

Soit le Motonyi was kept closed to safaris for more than a decade so that hunts were not broken up and families not scattered, and it opened again, to small numbers, in 2014.

What that has left is ground with very few vehicles on it, kopjes and acacia belts along a river valley, and good cheetah country, though no published count backs that up, so take it as likely rather than proven.

The three nights are about resident cats and about space, not about the herds, and the long unhurried sightings this stop is built on are a direct result of how few other vehicles are about.

It varies a great deal from stop to stop, and that is worth weighing before you compare this with a straight reserve safari.

Naboisho caps the vehicles at any one sighting, and the limit is between four and six, so take it as a handful rather than a crowd across sixty thousand acres leased from more than seven hundred Maasai landowners.

The eastern Serengeti is quieter still, which is the whole point of going there. The crater is the exception and there is no way around it: a small, open, popular place that is busy all year, which is exactly why the early descent from a rim camp matters.

Between them, the four nights in the conservancy and the three on the eastern plains are what you will remember for the quiet.

July to October, which all five of our own pages for this route rate highly, and which is also when the wildebeest reach the Mara.

Within that stretch August and September are the busiest, so if you would rather have the conservancy and the eastern plains to yourselves, July or October gives much the same conditions with more room.

February is the other month we would happily pick: clear on the crater rim, strong for the Mara's resident cats, and close to the calving if you wanted to add it. June is decent, better at the crater than in the Mara.

April and May sit under the long rains and are rated lowest at every stop, and March is the month we would steer you away from in the Mara.

Two nights on the rim gives one full morning on the floor, which is how this route is written and which suits most people, since the crater is a small place and a busy one.

Add a night if you want a second descent, and tell us early either way, because we would rather hold the dates than find them gone.

The rest bends easily:

• The four nights in Naboisho can be split with a camp inside the reserve if a river crossing matters to you between July and October
• The three on the eastern plains can move north to the Serengeti in those same months
• The night in Nairobi goes altogether if you land early enough to travel on

What we would not cut is the eastern Serengeti, which is the hardest part of this trip to find elsewhere.