Someone from our team meets you in the arrivals hall at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, helps with your bags and drives you to your hotel. The transfer takes between 20 minutes and well over an hour at rush hour, depending on the hotel you choose.

The rest of the day is yours. After a long flight most travellers shower, eat and sleep. If you land in the morning, you can fit in a few hours in the city: hand-feeding Rothschild's giraffes at the Giraffe Centre, or watching orphaned baby elephants trot in for their late-morning feed at the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust nursery.

We confirm your pick-up time for tomorrow's early start north. Dinner is at your hotel.

You leave Nairobi after an early breakfast and head north through the central highlands: tea and coffee farms, roadside fruit stalls and, on a clear morning, the jagged peaks of Mount Kenya, Africa's second-highest mountain. At Nanyuki you stop at the sign that marks the equator and stand with a foot in each hemisphere.

After Isiolo the country changes fast. The road drops, the soil turns red, and green fields give way to thorn scrub, doum palms and Samburu herders in red cloth and beads. You reach your lodge in the early afternoon for a late lunch and a rest through the heat of the day. Some camps are a further half hour or so along game-drive tracks inside the reserve.

At about four o'clock you head out on your first game drive along the Ewaso Nyiro River, the reserve's lifeline. Elephants come down to drink and throw red dust over their backs, and you start meeting the northern species that do not live in the Maasai Mara: reticulated giraffe, Grevy's zebra, gerenuk, Beisa oryx and the blue-legged Somali ostrich. Far from any city, the night sky here is thick with stars.

You set out at first light, around half past six, while it is cool and the animals are busy. Samburu is one of Kenya's better places for leopard, and the trees along the river are where your guide looks first. Lions are often still active after a night's hunting, and you may watch a gerenuk rise onto its hind legs to reach acacia leaves no other antelope can.

You are back for a late breakfast. By early afternoon it is hot, often above 30°C, so the middle of the day is for lunch at the lodge, the pool, a nap, or watching elephants cross the river from the shade.

The afternoon drive runs from about four until sunset, when the light turns the hills copper and herds of elephant gather at the water. If you would like to meet the Samburu people, a visit to a nearby village can be added today.

After breakfast you game-drive your way out of Samburu and head south past Isiolo, with Mount Kenya growing larger ahead of you if the clouds allow. Near Nanyuki you turn into Ol Pejeta Conservancy and reach camp in the early afternoon for lunch.

Ol Pejeta is East Africa's largest black rhino sanctuary and a very good place to see black and white rhinos close up. It is also home to the last two northern white rhinos on Earth, Najin and Fatu, and to Grevy's zebra and Jackson's hartebeest. Your afternoon drive crosses open plains with Mount Kenya behind them: rhinos grazing, elephants, buffalo and, with luck, lions.

Shape the afternoon to suit you. The Sweetwaters Chimpanzee Sanctuary is open from 2 pm until 4:30 pm. It is the only place in Kenya to see chimpanzees, and it cares for animals orphaned or rescued elsewhere, and their offspring. Standard entry is covered by your conservancy entry, so tell us in advance if you would like to go. Shared night drives run in the evening for guests staying in the conservancy, subject to minimum numbers, and can be added.

Go out early for rhinos in the soft morning light, then have breakfast and drive west across the Laikipia plateau. You can break the journey at Thomson's Falls in Nyahururu, where the river drops into a forested gorge, before descending into the Great Rift Valley to Lake Nakuru.

You reach your lodge for a late lunch, so the afternoon drive is short. Skip the falls if you are running late. Lake Nakuru is small and fenced, which makes it one of the most dependable places in Kenya for rhinos, both black and white, often grazing on the open grass by the shore. Rothschild's giraffe, buffalo and waterbuck are easy to find, lions sometimes rest up in the yellow fever trees, and leopards live in the woodland.

Flamingo numbers rise and fall with the level of the lake: in some years the shoreline is pink, in others the birds have moved to neighbouring lakes. Pelicans, fish eagles and hundreds of other bird species are here whatever the year.

Start with a morning drive in the park, including the viewpoint at Baboon Cliff where the whole lake and park spread out below you. After breakfast it is a drive south along the floor of the Rift Valley, past Lake Elementaita, to Lake Naivasha in time for lunch.

In the afternoon you can go out on the lake by boat. Naivasha is a freshwater lake and it is full of hippos: you pass pods of them surfacing and snorting while the boatman keeps a respectful distance, African fish eagles call from the acacias and drop onto the water for fish, and pelicans, cormorants and kingfishers work the shallows.

If you want to stretch your legs, add a guided walk on Crescent Island, where giraffe, zebra, wildebeest and waterbuck graze and there are no big predators, so you can walk among them. After dark, hippos leave the water to graze, which is why at many lakeside lodges the staff walk you to your room.

You leave after an early breakfast and follow the Rift Valley floor past the volcano of Mount Longonot, then climb out of the valley to Narok, the last sizeable town before the reserve and a good place to stretch your legs. Beyond Narok the farms give way to open Maasai grazing land, cattle and herders wrapped in red shuka. The last hour is on rough track, so expect a bumpy finish.

You reach camp in time for a late lunch and settle in. At about four you set out on your first Mara game drive: grassland rolling to the horizon, topi standing sentry on termite mounds, elephants and giraffe, and a good chance of lions, since the Mara is one of the best places in Africa to see them. Guides here share sightings with each other, so yours will already know where the big cats were seen this morning.

You are back at camp around sunset for dinner, and as you fall asleep you may hear hyenas whooping out on the plains. At Luxury level the camp sits deeper in the reserve, close to the river crossings, so allow an extra hour or so on the track, or fly this leg.

If you have chosen the hot-air balloon (USD 450 per person), you are collected before dawn, lift off as the sun comes up and drift over the plains for about an hour, then land to a champagne breakfast in the bush before your guide picks you up for the rest of the day.

On other mornings you can leave early with a packed lunch and make a full day of it, or come back to camp for lunch. This is the day to go further: to the Mara River, where hippos crowd the pools and Nile crocodiles bask on the banks, and across plains where cheetahs use termite mounds as lookouts. With the whole day in hand, you can wait with a lion pride or a hunting cheetah without watching the clock.

From July to October the Great Migration is here: hundreds of thousands of wildebeest and zebra covering the grass and, with patience and luck, a river crossing. Crossings can happen at any point in those months, but nobody can promise the day. Outside the migration the Mara's resident lions, cheetahs, leopards, elephants and hyenas stay put, and there are fewer vehicles.

Today you go back for whatever the last two days left unfinished: the leopard you missed, a cheetah worth watching hunt, the pride you have grown fond of. Your guide works the thickets and dry riverbeds where leopards rest by day. Many travellers split the day: a morning drive, a long lunch and a rest at camp, then out again at four for the best light.

Around midday you can visit a Maasai village near the reserve (USD 30 per person). A family welcomes you into their homestead, shows you the houses the women build from sticks, mud and cow dung, and the young men perform the jumping dance. Ask how a family keeps cattle safe from lions and hyenas, and what the beadwork colours mean.

Your last evening is for watching the sun go down over the plains, a final dinner at camp and an early night before the journey back to Nairobi.

After an early breakfast you drive back to Nairobi through Narok and over the Rift Valley escarpment, stopping at a viewpoint for one last look across the valley floor if the route allows. Lunch is on the road, or ask us to add a Nairobi lunch. You reach Nairobi in the early afternoon, traffic permitting. At Luxury level the camp sits deeper in the reserve, so allow an extra hour or so, or fly.

Depending on your flight, we take you straight to Jomo Kenyatta International Airport or, if you prefer, to a day room to shower and rest first. If your international flight leaves before about 8 pm, tell us and we will suggest flying back from the Mara instead.

Would you rather skip the drive? Take the optional scheduled flight from a Mara airstrip to Nairobi's Wilson Airport: about 45 minutes to an hour in a light aircraft, with the plains laid out below you. We arrange the transfer from Wilson to the international airport. Luggage on these flights is limited to 15 kg per person in soft bags.