rwanda & kenya: gorillas and a private beach house

The odds are strongly in your favour, though no wild animal can be promised.

No official rate is published, but we put success at better than 95 per cent, and that rests on a routine: each habituated family is picked up at its night nests before dawn and kept in sight until you arrive.

The effort is harder to predict. Reaching your family can take half an hour or four hours and more, climbing through bamboo, nettles and mud at somewhere between 2,500 and 4,000 metres, where thin air makes any slope feel steeper.

Twelve families are habituated here, and the 7am gathering at Kinigi shares them out with fitness in mind, so be honest about what you want to walk. Porters can be taken on at the trailhead for the bag and a steadying arm.

Three nights at the foot of the volcanoes leave room for a second trek, or a rest day after the first.

It means there are no other guests.

Three of the stays on this route are taken whole:

• Villa Kigali, a four-bedroom house with its own chef and butler
• Kimya Kimya in Mara North, three rooms for up to six people
• Sirai Beach at Kilifi, six suites for up to twelve

The house, the staff and the guides are yours alone, you set the timetable, and the chef cooks to your tastes. That holds whether you are two or ten, which is why this route works well for a family or for friends travelling together, and we adjust the other stays to the size of your party.

Two limits to plan around: the minimum age for gorilla tracking is 15, and Sarara Treehouses, while taking children of any age, suits six and over. A whole house takes one booking at a time, so its dates go early. Tell us yours as soon as you can.

By road and light aircraft, and mostly by air once you reach Kenya.

Volcanoes National Park is two and a half to three hours by road from Kigali. Both countries' national airlines fly between Kigali and Nairobi, which is why the route pauses for a night in Karen.

Inside Kenya the conservancies are linked by light aircraft, typically a Cessna Caravan, with 15 kilograms of luggage each in soft bags, hand luggage included, and flights that may call at other airstrips on the way. Scheduled services do not reach everywhere.

Sarara, for instance, is served by private charter to the Namunyak airstrip, or by a scheduled flight to Kalama and about an hour and a half by road, and Ol Malo arranges aircraft direct to the ranch. For legs like those we can charter, typically a Cessna Caravan or a Pilatus PC-12.

We confirm every flight when we plan your trip, and send the current visa rules for both countries at the same time.

Yes, and it is an easy addition.

Sarara Treehouses is about 45 minutes' drive from Reteti, which lies inside the same Namunyak conservancy. Reteti opened in August 2016 to rescue orphaned and abandoned elephant calves from across northern Kenya, between ten and fifteen in a typical year, and to return them to the wild instead of keeping them.

It is owned by the local community, and its keepers are all Samburu, drawn from Namunyak itself. They feed the calves by bottle every three hours and walk them out into the bush each day.

A visit is not written into the sample days, so ask us to add it when we plan your three nights. It sits well beside the elephants you meet on Sarara's own ground, where wild herds move beneath the treehouse decks and come to the waterhole below the pool.

Five months carry our top rating from the volcanoes all the way to Kilifi: July and August first, then September, January and February.

Each of them gives firm gorilla trails, good game viewing in the Mara and the north, and calm, clear water on the coast.

June and October are in-between months, good in parts of the route and showery in others, and December is mixed inland but sunny at Kilifi.

The long rains of April and May are the one stretch we would talk you out of, mud inland and a dulled sea at Kilifi, and March is the hardest month of all on the volcanoes. November is awkward for a practical reason as well as the short rains: Sarara Treehouses closes for the month.

The wetter months still have advantages, among them easier gorilla permits, lower prices, green country with newborn animals, and soft light for photographs.

Yes. Seventeen nights is the full version, and most of it can flex.

The easiest saving is in the north. Sarara and Ol Malo both offer riding, walking and camels with Samburu guides, one in forested mountains and the other on open ranchland, so choosing between them saves three nights without losing a whole kind of experience. The coast can shrink, grow or move to another stretch of the Kenyan shore.

The fixed points are fewer but firm. Only eight permits exist for each gorilla family each day, so those are booked before anything else.

Kimya Kimya and Sirai Beach each take a single party, so their dates decide the order of what surrounds them. Sarara Treehouses is shut for the whole of November.

Tell us how long you have and what matters most, and we will shape the route to fit.