tanzania & kenya: the serengeti herds and lewa’s rhino

It buys more mornings inside the window, which is the only thing that genuinely helps.

Four nights on Kogakuria Kopje put you a few kilometres from the crossing points on the Tanzanian bank, where the park authority signs sixteen of them along the river. Four more on the west bank in Mara North put you in Kenya, although from there the crossings are a full day out into the national reserve rather than a drive before breakfast.

Between roughly July and October that is eight nights in crossing country. None of it can be promised and no honest percentage exists: a herd may go in minutes after arriving, hold the bank for days, or turn back and graze.

The busier Tanzanian points also draw a crowd of vehicles in August and September, so an early start matters.

For this route, no, and it is the reason the trip works.

Four nights gives three full days at each stop, and because each booking travels with its own vehicle, guide and spotter, a day can be spent sitting with one leopard or driving to the river and back without anyone else's plans deciding it. Three nights would turn every stop into a highlights reel.

If three weeks is more than you have, the single night at Arusha goes first, provided you land early enough to travel on. After that the cut depends on the month: between July and October the two Mara River stays overlap in purpose, so one can give its nights to the other.

Outside those months the northern Serengeti still holds resident lion and elephant, but the river is quiet.

It is village land set aside for wildlife.

Tanzania's Wildlife Management Areas are formed when member villages agree to put part of their land into a conservation area, a scheme that has run since 2003, and Burunge sits in the Kwakuchinja corridor between Tarangire and Lake Manyara.

Busy is not the word for it. The camp's patch of the area is exclusive use, and the camp itself is five tented rooms and a family unit, so the ground is shared with very few people.

Because this is not a national park, the days can hold:

• Tracking spoor on foot with a Maasai guide
• Driving off the track
• Game drives after dark

Two practical points on the camp: children are taken from eight years old, and it closes for a short break from April to the end of May.

It means no road comes to the door.

The camp can only be reached on foot, over a narrow rope bridge, so vehicles wait on the far bank and every drive begins and ends with that crossing, luggage included.

It is a short walk rather than a feat, but it is a suspension bridge above a river, so anyone unsteady on their feet, or uneasy about heights or water, should tell us before we hold it.

What you get in exchange is four tents on the bank itself, three looking at the rapids and one onto a hippo pool, and a stay in a conservancy rather than a reserve, where the guide may drive after dark, walk you out, and leave the track for a sighting.

They are the reason those nights sit where they do.

Nothing earlier on this route holds rhino: the Serengeti kopje, the Mara riverbank and the escarpment ranch are cat, herd and horse country, so this is the single stop where rhino are the point rather than a bonus.

There are 280 or more, on a 93,000-acre range the conservancy shares with neighbouring Borana, and that ground holds 14 per cent of the country's rhino. That figure covers the full range, not the few thousand acres a morning drive takes in, and no wild animal can be promised.

What four nights at the end of three weeks buy is patience. By then the guide knows what you want to look at, so a day can go to one animal instead of a list. A look behind the scenes at how the conservancy protects them can be arranged.

July to October is this route's natural window, and July, August and September come out on top at every one of the eight places we rate along it.

That is when the Mara River crossings run, when Tarangire's elephant herds gather along the river, and when the Laikipia highlands are dry underfoot. October is as good in Tanzania and the Mara and a little softer in Laikipia, which is also where November's short rains do the most damage.

January and February are the alternative if the wildebeest are not the point, with strong ratings for the Mara, the Laikipia plateau and northern Kenya, and the Serengeti nights better spent down near the calving.

The long rains land in April and May, the poorest stretch anywhere here, and the camp in the Burunge concession takes its yearly break from April until the end of May.