Serengeti National Park

The Serengeti is not a park so much as an ecosystem, running for fourteen thousand square kilometres from the Ngorongoro highlands to the Kenyan border, where it becomes the Masai Mara. The name comes from the Maa word siringet, meaning the place where the land runs on forever, and that is an accurate description of the southern plains.

What makes it exceptional is not the scenery but the sheer volume of life moving across it. Roughly 1.3 million wildebeest and a few hundred thousand zebra travel through it in a continuous annual circuit, following rainfall. Where they go, the predators follow, and the Serengeti holds one of the largest lion populations anywhere, along with leopard along the river courses and cheetah on the open grass.

We base most Serengeti safaris in the central Seronera area, where the river holds game year round and where you are within reach of the rest of the park. Between December and March we move south toward Ndutu for the calving season, when half a million wildebeest are born within a few weeks and the predator activity is at its most concentrated of the entire year. Between July and October the herds are in the north around the Mara River, and reaching them requires extra nights.