tanzania & kenya: serengeti to laikipia in three weeks

Five moves across three weeks, which is less than the length suggests.

The nights run two, four, four, three, four and four, so at every stop but the first you unpack properly rather than living out of a bag. The opening leg is the hour by road from Kilimanjaro airport.

The rest go by light aircraft, and only one of them takes a day: the move from the northern Serengeti into Kenya, where passports have to be cleared on the Kenyan side rather than inside either park, so the flight either calls there on the way or the route goes around through Nairobi.

The last two hops stay inside Kenya, Mara North up to the Laikipia escarpment and then across to Lewa. Dates decide which border routing applies, because the cross-border flight is not offered all year round.

Yes, and the month decides where the cut falls.

The Kogatende nights exist for the Mara River, and the camp only stands up there from June, so outside those months they are the first to go and the route becomes a straight run of big cats, ranch and rhino.

Inside the crossing months the opposite holds: Kogatende and Mara North both sit in the migration, so one can go and the other take its nights. The two nights on Mount Meru are the easy trim if you land early enough to fly on the same day.

What we would keep is the pair at the end. The escarpment ranch is horses, camels and Samburu guiding, and Lewa is rhino and dry-country species, so losing either turns three distinct kinds of country into two.

Typically an Airbus H125, the type Tropic Air flies across northern Kenya.

Typically, because no one can promise a particular airframe on the day, and the company also has one larger Airbus H130.

The H125 suits this morning for two reasons. It works in heat and height, with an operational capability up to 23,000 feet, and the flight leaves a Laikipia escarpment and drops into desert within a morning.

And doors off is the reason to go rather than a flourish. The flying is low level, doors often wide open, seats forward and headsets on, so nothing sits between a lens and the floor of the Suguta Valley or the shore of Lake Turkana.

Numbers are the one constraint. Five passengers and a pilot is the H125's limit, so a party of six needs the larger machine or a second flight.

Because it is an hour from the airport and nothing like the rest of the trip.

Arusha National Park covers 552 square kilometres on the flanks of Mount Meru, Tanzania's second-highest peak at 4,566 metres, and its days are walked rather than driven: the park authority arranges hiking at its gates and requires an armed ranger escort on the mountain itself.

What that buys is montane forest instead of plains, fig and cedar, colobus calling at first light and Sykes' monkeys working the branches below, ground you cross at walking pace with a ranger rather than from a seat in a vehicle. Two nights also absorb the flight in, so the Serengeti plains begin with you rested.

Canoeing on Small Momella Lake can be added if you want it, with buffalo, giraffe and waterbuck often at the water; the park takes it by prior arrangement, so tell us in advance.

A different cast of animals.

North of Mount Kenya the country is drier, and the commoner plains species give way to their arid-country relatives: Grevy's zebra, reticulated giraffe, gerenuk, Beisa oryx and the Somali race of ostrich.

Grevy's is the one worth knowing about. It is the rarest zebra there is, with roughly three thousand left in the wild, and 264 counted across this landscape, so a meaningful share of what remains lives on the ground you are driving over.

Wild dog move through too, although they range over enormous distances and a sighting is luck rather than planning: Laikipia has nine packs and 80 to 90 animals. Black and white rhino are both resident, and four nights gives several mornings to look for them.

June opens it and October closes it, with July, August and September the strongest stretch inside that.

The camp at Kogatende only stands up there from June, and the crossings on the Mara River run from about late July into October, so the second half of the year is when this itinerary is itself.

Our own month-by-month advice for all seven places on this route settles on the same three: July through September. October matches that in the Serengeti and the Mara and eases off in Laikipia, where November is the low point of the year.

January and February make a real alternative if the northern Serengeti nights move south to the calving instead, since our advice rates both months highly for the Mara, for Laikipia and for the north of Kenya.

The long rains in April and May put every stop on it at its lowest.