rwanda & tanzania: three parks and the serengeti

Two visas, and one flying day in the middle.

The two countries are not in one scheme: the joint East Africa Tourist Visa covers Rwanda, Kenya and Uganda only, so Tanzania needs a visa of its own. British passport holders are told by the Foreign Office to get the Tanzanian e-visa online first, though a single-entry visa is also issued at the main points of entry.

The Rwandan national carrier links Kigali with Kilimanjaro, and some of its published itineraries route through Dar es Salaam, so we confirm the day's routing rather than assume a straight hop.

From Kilimanjaro a bush flight reaches the southern Serengeti in the afternoon, landing at the Serengeti South airstrip, a 90 minute drive from the camp. Those flights hold you to 15 kilograms each in soft bags, cabin bag included.

The route is built around it, and the camp's own calendar is the thing to plan by.

Ubuntu Migration Camp stands at Kusini in the southern Serengeti from mid-December to mid-March and moves to the north of the park from June to mid-November, so the four nights on the calving plains exist only inside that southern window.

Calving has usually begun by mid-January, and the births peak in February, when eight to twelve thousand are born a day at the height of it. None of this is a timetable.

The herds follow the rain, the pattern shifts from year to year, and in a drier year they gather closer to Ndutu. What the short grass reliably draws is predators, and watching lion and cheetah work in the open is the real reason to be here. Nothing is ever promised.

This is cheetah ground, and the reason is the years it was left alone.

The Frankfurt Zoological Society ran long-term cheetah research here with the Serengeti Cheetah Project, and the eastern Serengeti stayed closed to tourism for more than a decade while that went on.

The grassland sits on old volcanic ash, which favours open grass over thick woodland, and open grass is what a cheetah hunts in. No published figure exists for how often they are seen, so treat cheetah over four nights as likely rather than certain, with lion and leopard alongside and serval and caracal as the lucky extras.

The other difference is room. The nearest airstrip is a two hour drive away, which is why so few vehicles reach these plains and why a sighting can be watched out to its end.

The odds are good and nobody promises them.

Rwanda publishes no official success figure, and we put the rate at better than 95 per cent. What stands behind it is method rather than luck: trackers reach each family at first light from the nests it slept in and stay with it.

The walk is the part people underestimate. The gorillas range between about 2,500 and 4,000 metres, the going is bamboo, stinging nettles and mud, and a trek can be half an hour's walk or four hours and more.

Everyone gathers at the Kinigi headquarters at 7am, where families are allocated by fitness, so say plainly what you want; staying at Kinigi itself makes that an easy start. Porters carry bags and steady you on the steep parts, and the minimum age is 15.

This route is written for the southern summer, because the calving camp only stands at Kusini from mid-December to mid-March.

February is the month we rate highest across it: recommended on our own pages for Akagera, for the volcanoes, for the Serengeti and for Rwanda as a whole, with the births at their heaviest and the volcanoes in their short dry spell.

January runs it close, and the plains are quieter then than at the dry-season peak. December works too, greener, with the herds still gathering.

March we would not push, since the rains are arriving on the volcanoes and the camp strikes at mid-month. If your dates fall between June and September, the driest and firmest stretch for the gorillas and for Akagera, we would keep Rwanda as written and move the Tanzanian nights north to follow the herds.

Almost all of it, and only two things set the frame.

The gorilla permit is the first: eight are issued for each habituated family each day, 96 in the whole park, and each one is dated, so we hold that morning first and hang the rest of the calendar on it. The calving camp is the second, because it stands at Kusini only between mid-December and mid-March.

Everything else moves. Akagera can shrink to two nights or take a fourth with more time on the lake; the eastern plains can absorb the nights instead; and the road from Kigali to the volcanoes, two and a half to three hours, can be flown in about half an hour by helicopter, typically an Agusta, if long drives do not appeal after a flight.

Outside the calving window we would swap the southern nights for the north.