Your driver-guide meets you in the arrivals hall at Entebbe International Airport and drives you the few minutes to your hotel on the shore of Lake Victoria, the largest lake in Africa. After a long flight the pace is deliberately slow: a shower, a cold drink on the terrace and a first look at the water, with fish eagles and kites wheeling over the shore.

If you land early, the Entebbe Botanical Gardens make a gentle first taste of Uganda, with black-and-white colobus monkeys and hornbills in the old trees. In the evening your guide talks you through the days ahead in Uganda, and dinner is at the hotel.

After an early breakfast you head west, skirting Kampala on the bypass and rolling out through banana groves, papyrus swamps and roadside stalls piled with pineapples and matoke. Your guide stops for coffee and for anything worth a photograph, and lunch is on the way.

The last stretch is the most beautiful. Around Fort Portal the land rises into tea estates and crater lakes, and on a clear afternoon the Rwenzori Mountains stand along the western horizon. You reach the Kibale area in the late afternoon, in time to settle in and listen to the forest at dusk: tree hyraxes shrieking, owls and, sometimes, a distant chimpanzee call.

Depending on your lodge, the briefing point at Kanyanchu is between a few minutes and about an hour away, so we set tomorrow's wake-up time to suit.

Kibale holds around 1,500 chimpanzees and thirteen primate species in all, and this morning you go looking for them. After the ranger briefing at Kanyanchu you walk into the forest in a small group, following calls and the sound of branches shaking high in the canopy. When you find the community you spend an hour with them as they feed in the fig trees, groom each other, squabble and drum on the buttress roots.

On the trail you are likely to see red colobus, mangabeys and L'Hoest's monkeys, and butterflies in every colour. The trek usually takes between two and five hours in total, depending on where the chimpanzees are.

The afternoon is free. Rest at the lodge, or join an optional guided walk in the community-run Bigodi Wetland Sanctuary nearby, where great blue turacos and more monkeys are often seen from the boardwalks.

You drive south past the crater lakes of Fort Portal and down onto the floor of the Albertine Rift, crossing the equator near the northern edge of Queen Elizabeth National Park. The Rwenzoris fall away behind you and the country opens into grassland, candelabra trees and scattered acacia.

After lunch you go out on the water. A two-hour boat trip along the Kazinga Channel, which links Lake George and Lake Edward, brings you alongside pods of hippo, buffalo wallowing in the shallows, Nile crocodiles on the banks and elephants coming down to drink. The birdlife is remarkable: pied kingfishers, African fish eagles, pelicans and flocks of waders along the shore.

The boat trips leave from the Mweya peninsula. If your lodge is elsewhere in the park, as our Luxury pick is, allow up to an hour each way, and we will fit the boat trip to whichever time of day works best. You are back for sunset with the evening to yourselves.

Leave at first light for the Kasenyi plains, open grassland where Uganda kob gather in large herds and lions come to hunt them. Your guide reads the tracks and listens for alarm calls. This is also good country for elephants, buffalo and warthogs, and, with luck, a leopard in the thickets along the channel.

After a late breakfast and a rest through the heat of the day, the afternoon drive follows the rims of the explosion craters, old volcanic hollows now filled with forest, grassland or salt lakes, with views across the park to the Rwenzoris. More than 600 bird species have been recorded in Queen Elizabeth, so keep the binoculars close.

Today you travel south through the park to the Ishasha sector, known for lions that climb into the branches of the big fig trees to rest in the shade. They are never guaranteed, so your guide checks the favourite trees one by one while you scan the plains for topi, kob, buffalo and elephants.

Lunch is a picnic beside the Ishasha River, which forms the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo, often with hippos grunting below. In the afternoon the road climbs out of the rift into steep hills of tea and terraced farms, and the dark wall of Bwindi Impenetrable Forest comes into view. You arrive at Buhoma, on the forest's northern edge, in time to unpack before dinner. Nights up here are cool, so keep a fleece handy.

This is the morning many travellers cross the world for. Bwindi shelters about 40 per cent of the world's mountain gorillas. After an early breakfast you walk to the park office for the ranger briefing, then set off in a group of no more than eight visitors. Trackers left at dawn to find the gorilla family where it nested last night, and they radio its position as you climb.

The trek can take anything from an hour to most of the day, on steep, slippery paths through ferns, vines and thick undergrowth. When you reach the gorillas, you have one hour with them: a silverback resting against a tree, mothers with infants, youngsters tumbling through the leaves. You keep a respectful distance and the rangers set the pace, and most people remember the quiet as much as anything.

Hiring a local porter is worth it. They carry your daypack, lend a hand on the steep sections, and the work matters to families around the park. Wear long trousers, boots and garden gloves for the nettles, and carry a rain jacket, water and the packed lunch from your lodge. The evening is for a hot shower, a good dinner and swapping stories.

A slower start after yesterday's trek. Over breakfast you can watch the mist lift off the forest, and if your flight leaves in the afternoon there may be time for an optional walk through Buhoma village or a Batwa cultural experience, led by the forest people who once lived inside Bwindi. Then your guide drives you to the airstrip at Kihihi, about one and a half to two hours through tea, banana farms and terraced hills, longer on wet roads.

The scheduled light-aircraft flight to Entebbe takes about one hour and 45 minutes, with the patchwork hills below and, as you come in to land, the wide sweep of Lake Victoria. Flight times vary by day and season, and we confirm yours when we quote. We give this journey a day and a night in Entebbe of its own, so a late aircraft never puts your onward flight at risk. Pack light: small aircraft have a strict soft-bag limit (see the luggage question below).

You are met at Entebbe airport and taken to your hotel for the night. A packed lunch from your lodge covers the journey, and dinner is at the hotel.

After a relaxed breakfast you are taken to Entebbe International Airport for the flight to Nairobi, about one hour and 20 minutes across Lake Victoria. Your Kenyan driver-guide meets you at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport and takes you to your hotel.

The rest of the day is yours: rest, a swim, or, if you land early enough, an optional visit to the Giraffe Centre, where you can feed Rothschild's giraffes from a raised platform. Lunch is not included today, and dinner is at the hotel. Tomorrow the Kenya leg begins with your own Land Cruiser with a pop-up roof.

You leave Nairobi after an early breakfast and soon pull over at the viewpoint on the edge of the Great Rift Valley, where the land drops away to the valley floor and the cone of Mount Longonot. Beyond the market town of Narok, the farmland gives way to open rangeland dotted with Maasai cattle and your first zebras and gazelles.

You reach camp in time for lunch, and by mid-afternoon you are out on your first game drive in the Maasai Mara. It is one of the best places in Africa to see lions, and it rarely takes long to find them. You stay out until the light turns soft and gold, then head back for dinner.

If you have booked the optional hot-air balloon, you are collected before dawn and lift off as the sun comes up, drifting low over the plains, and over the Mara River if the wind allows, before landing for a champagne breakfast in the bush. Otherwise you head out at first light with coffee in the vehicle.

With a picnic lunch on board you have the whole day to explore. Cheetahs scan the open plains from termite mounds, leopards rest in the trees along the rivers and elephant families move between the thickets. From about July to October, when the wildebeest and zebra migration is in the Mara, your guide watches the herds for a river crossing: often hours of waiting, then a few minutes of dust, noise and crocodiles. In the other months, the resident lions, hyenas and plains game keep the Mara busy.

Your guide picks a different corner from yesterday, the Talek River or the open plains towards the Tanzanian border, depending on where the cats have been. If you prefer a gentler rhythm, split the day into a morning and an afternoon drive with a rest at camp in between.

In the afternoon you can join an optional visit to a Maasai village near the reserve. You are welcomed with song, invited into a home built of mud, sticks and cow dung, and shown how fire is made by hand. It is a good chance to ask about Maasai life today, from cattle and school to how families live alongside the wildlife. Your last drive back to camp is timed for sunset.

A last early game drive on the way out of the reserve, then north through Narok and up through farmland on the slopes of the Mau escarpment to Nakuru. You arrive in the early afternoon for a late lunch.

Lake Nakuru National Park is small, fenced and full of life. Black and white rhinos both live here, and it is one of the most reliable places in Kenya to see them, along with Rothschild's giraffes, buffalo, waterbuck and troops of baboons. Flamingos come and go with the water levels, but pelicans and other waterbirds are almost always on the shore. You finish at Baboon Cliff, with the whole lake below you as the sun drops.

After an early game drive in Nakuru, while the rhinos graze in the cool of the morning, you drive south along the floor of the Rift Valley to Lake Naivasha, a freshwater lake fringed with papyrus and yellow fever trees. You arrive for lunch with an easy afternoon ahead.

The optional boat ride is the best way to spend it. You glide past pods of hippo and watch African fish eagles swoop to the water, then step ashore on Crescent Island to walk with a guide among giraffes, zebras, wildebeest and waterbuck. With no big predators on the island, it is one of the few places on this trip where you can walk among the animals. After dark, hippos leave the lake to graze, so at many of the lakeside lodges a guard walks you to your room.

This is one of the longer road days, so you leave straight after breakfast. The road climbs out of the Rift Valley, skirts Nairobi and runs south-east towards the Tanzanian border side of the country and Amboseli. Your guide breaks the journey with coffee and stretch stops.

You arrive for a late lunch. As the afternoon cools you head out on your first drive, and if the clouds lift, Kilimanjaro appears above the plains, its snow cap floating over the dust. Late afternoon and early morning are usually the best times to see it.

Be out early. Dawn is when Kilimanjaro is most often clear, and the light on the mountain with elephants walking below it is the picture that brought you here. Amboseli's elephants have been studied since 1972 and are relaxed around vehicles, which means close, unhurried sightings of families, small calves and big-tusked bulls.

The swamps, fed by water that filters down from Kilimanjaro, draw hippos, buffalo, pelicans and herons, while lions, cheetahs and hyenas work the dry plains around them. Later in the day you climb Observation Hill for a view across the whole park, then rest before a last drive in the late afternoon.

Tomorrow is the longest day of the trip, so tonight is an early one.

Today you cross into Tanzania, and the border sets the pace, so we leave early. You drive across Amboseli to the western gate at Meshanani, which takes up to two hours from the lodges on the Kimana side and gives you a last morning of game viewing on the way. From there the road runs to the border town of Namanga, with about 30 km of gravel along the way.

At Namanga your Kenyan guide helps you through the border post, which handles both countries' formalities in one place. Queues vary, so allow one to two hours. You are then handed over to your Tanzanian driver-guide and a fresh Land Cruiser. Keep your passport, visa, yellow fever certificate and your Tanzania insurance certificate within easy reach.

The tarmac road continues south past the long ridge of Mount Longido to Arusha, with Mount Meru rising behind the town. You stop there for lunch and reach your hotel in the afternoon, with time for a swim and a proper rest. Nothing after this is as long a day on the road, and Tarangire is only a couple of hours away tomorrow.

After a relaxed breakfast you leave Arusha and drive south through farmland and dry acacia country, arriving at Tarangire around lunchtime. Baobabs start to appear beside the road as you near the park.

In the afternoon you head out on your first game drive, often past elephants and baobabs on the way in. The light in the late afternoon is at its best here, and you are back at the lodge before dark.

Tarangire is a park of giants: ancient baobabs with trunks wider than your vehicle, and some of the largest elephant herds in Tanzania, especially in the dry months from about June to October, when the Tarangire River is the main water for miles around. You spend the whole day exploring, with a picnic lunch in the park.

Watch for lions resting under the acacias, buffalo at the river and shy antelope you will not see elsewhere on this route, such as fringe-eared oryx and lesser kudu. Tarangire is superb for birds too, from yellow-collared lovebirds to the kori bustard, one of the heaviest birds that can fly.

A final morning drive in Tarangire, then the road passes the busy market town of Mto wa Mbu and climbs the Rift Valley escarpment, with Lake Manyara shimmering below. By lunchtime you are in Karatu, a cool highland town of coffee farms and red earth on the edge of the Ngorongoro Conservation Area.

The afternoon is at your own pace. Walk the lodge gardens, sit by the fire as the evening chill comes in, or join an optional coffee farm tour and follow a bean from the bush to the cup. If you want one more park, we can add an afternoon game drive in Lake Manyara, known for its birdlife and forested lakeshore.

You leave early with a picnic packed, climb through the misty forest on the crater's outer wall and stop at the rim viewpoint. Below lies the Ngorongoro Crater, one of the largest intact volcanic calderas in the world, around 600 metres deep and about 19 kilometres across, with a whole ecosystem living on its floor.

The track down brings you into grassland, swamp and a soda lake edged pink with flamingos when the water suits them. This is a rare chance to see the critically endangered black rhino, though usually at a distance, and you are likely to find lions, spotted hyenas, buffalo, zebra, wildebeest and old bull elephants with heavy tusks.

Lunch is a picnic by the hippo pool; eat inside the vehicle if black kites are about, because they are quick. Time on the crater floor is limited to about six hours, so by mid-afternoon you climb out and return to Karatu.

Back up over the crater rim, the road winds down the far side through Maasai grazing land, where herders in red shukas walk with their cattle and giraffes browse beside the track. Then the view opens: the short-grass plains of the southern Serengeti, running all the way to the horizon.

After the gate formalities at Naabi Hill you game-drive north into the central Serengeti and reach your lodge in the mid to late afternoon. If you are curious about human origins, the optional detour to the museum at Olduvai Gorge, where some of the most important early human fossils were found, adds about an hour and leaves a little less game viewing that day.

The central Serengeti, around the Seronera River, is big cat country with good game in every month. You spend the day following the river and the granite kopjes that rise from the grass, where lion prides lie out on the warm rock and leopards rest in the shade of the riverside trees.

Cheetahs hunt gazelles on the open plains, and guides in the area share sightings by radio, so you hear quickly when something is happening. Lunch is a picnic in the field or back at the lodge. At night the Serengeti is loud with the whoop of hyenas and, if you are lucky, a lion roaring in the dark.

More than a million wildebeest, with hundreds of thousands of zebra and gazelle, move around the Serengeti and the Maasai Mara in a year-long circuit that follows the rain. Where they are depends on the month: on the southern plains from about December to March, when the calves are born; through the centre and west from around April to June; and in the north and across into the Mara from about July to October.

Your guide plans the day around the latest news of the herds. When they are within reach you set off early with a picnic. When they are far away, the resident lions, cheetahs, elephants and giraffes of the central Serengeti still make a superb day. For the best chance of being among the herds, ask us about moving your Serengeti nights with the seasons.

Start with an optional hot-air balloon flight at dawn, floating over the plains as the sun comes up, followed by breakfast in the bush where you land. Or keep it simple with an early drive to the hippo pool at Retina, where dozens of hippos crowd into a bend of the river.

Spend the afternoon on whatever is still missing from your list, whether that is a leopard, a cheetah hunt or one more hour with a lion pride. Your last night in the bush is a good one for photos, a sundowner and the Serengeti's dark sky.

A final short game drive on the way to the airstrip, then a scheduled light-aircraft flight to Zanzibar, direct on most days or via Arusha on others. You leave the golden plains behind and land around midday or in the early afternoon, on an island of palms, coral sand and turquoise water. Flight times vary by day, and we confirm yours when we quote.

We meet you at the airport and drive you to your beach resort, about an hour away, with the afternoon free. Take off your boots, swim, and let the sound of the sea replace the sound of the engine. The next three days hold nothing you have to do. Meals follow your resort's plan: half board at the least, and all-inclusive at some resorts, including our Midrange pick.

If you are ready to explore, today suits an optional guided tour of Stone Town, a UNESCO World Heritage Site of carved wooden doors, narrow lanes, mosques, churches and old Swahili merchant houses. Your guide tells the story of the island's trade in spices and ivory, and of the slave market whose site is now marked by the Anglican cathedral.

Combine it with a spice farm, where you smell and taste cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon and vanilla straight from the plant, and finish at the Forodhani Gardens food market as the sun goes down. Or stay on the beach. Depending on your resort, the tide either goes out a long way, revealing rock pools and the seaweed farms tended by village women, or the water stays deep enough to swim at most hours.

Two very different options today. A boat trip to Mnemba Atoll takes you snorkelling over coral gardens full of tropical fish, and dolphins are sometimes seen on the way. Jozani Forest, in the middle of the island, is home to the Zanzibar red colobus, a monkey found nowhere else on earth, and has a boardwalk through the mangroves.

Or do neither: you still have one more beach day.

Your last full day. Swim early before the heat, walk the beach at low tide and book the massage you have been promising yourself. In the late afternoon an optional sunset dhow cruise is a fine way to toast the end of a month in East Africa.

We confirm your airport transfer time today, so there is nothing to think about tomorrow except the flight home.

Enjoy a last breakfast by the sea and a final swim if your flight allows. At the agreed time we drive you to Abeid Amani Karume International Airport for your flight home or onward. If your flight leaves late in the day, ask us about a day room or a last afternoon in Stone Town.

You leave with a silverback's stare, the Mara's dust, the view into the crater and the sound of the sea.