A member of our team meets you in the arrivals hall at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport and takes you to your hotel. After a long flight, today is about a hot shower and a proper night's sleep. Before you turn in, we brief you on the days ahead, so you know exactly how tomorrow starts. Dinner is at the hotel restaurant, at your own cost.

If you land before about 08:30, we can book the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust elephant orphanage, whose one-hour public visit starts at 11:00 and must be booked in advance. Rescued elephant calves come in for their milk feed while keepers tell you how each one was orphaned. The Giraffe Centre, where you meet Rothschild's giraffes at eye level from a raised platform, works in the afternoon on any arrival. Send us your flight times and we will plan around them.

You leave after breakfast and head west. Within the first hour or so the ground falls away at the edge of the Great Rift Valley; look for the cone of Longonot, and later Suswa, as the road crosses the valley floor. Then comes Narok, the last big market town before the reserve, and open Maasai rangeland where herders walk their cattle beside the road.

You reach camp for a late lunch and a rest, then go out on your first game drive in the late afternoon, as the heat drops and the animals start to move. The Mara rarely keeps you waiting: zebra, topi and Thomson's gazelle on the open grass, elephants along the drainage lines, and a good chance of lions before the light goes.

Dinner is at camp. Listen after dark: a hyena's whoop carries for miles, and some nights a lion roars close enough to make you sit up in bed.

If you have booked the balloon, you are collected before dawn and lift off as the sun comes up, drifting low over the plains for about an hour, then breakfast out on the grass wherever you touch down. If not, you are out at first light on a game drive, when the cats are still on the move and the air is cool.

Today you take a picnic lunch and stay out, which gives your guide the range to go looking: down to the Mara River, where hippos crowd the pools and Nile crocodiles lie on the sandbanks, or out across the plains after cheetah. From about July to October the migrating herds mass along the river to cross. Nobody can schedule a crossing, so your guide reads the herds and decides where to wait. Outside those months the Mara still offers some of the best big-cat viewing in Africa, with lions, leopards and cheetahs resident all year.

You are back at camp as the light fades, in time to wash off the dust before dinner.

Your second full day is for filling the gaps. If you are still waiting on a leopard, your guide works the riverine trees along the Talek and Mara rivers, where leopards rest in the branches through the heat of the day. Rhino are few in the Mara and hard to find; Lake Nakuru and the Ngorongoro Crater give far better chances later in the trip.

After lunch you can choose to visit a Maasai village near the reserve. Families welcome you with song, show you inside homes built from sticks, mud and cow dung, and explain how cattle shape everything from diet to marriage. Then you head back out for a last evening drive, with the grass turning gold as the sun drops.

It is your last night in the Mara. If there is a sighting you want another go at, tell your guide over dinner and they will plan tomorrow's early drive around it.

A first-light game drive gives you a last look at the Mara, then breakfast and the road out. The first stretch can be dusty and slow, and then the land changes fast: north of Narok the road climbs into cool highland farming country of wheat fields and potato plots, before dropping back down to the Rift Valley floor at Nakuru.

You reach Lake Nakuru National Park in the early afternoon for a late lunch, then head out for a shorter afternoon drive, finishing at Baboon Cliff before the gates close. The park is fenced and is one of Kenya's most important rhino sanctuaries, with black and white rhino living side by side, and one of the best places in the country to see them. Look too for Rothschild's giraffe, buffalo, waterbuck and, with luck, a leopard in the yellow fever-tree woodland.

From Baboon Cliff you look down over the whole lake and the forest that rings it. Flamingo numbers rise and fall with the water level, so your guide will tell you what to expect when you visit. Dinner is at your lodge.

Go out early, when the lake is still and white rhinos graze the open grassland near the shore. After breakfast, an hour or two down the road brings you to Lake Naivasha, one of the Rift Valley's few freshwater lakes, fringed with papyrus and fever trees.

The afternoon is spent on the water. Hippos surface with a snort a safe distance off, pelicans and cormorants work the shallows, and African fish eagles hunt from the lakeside trees and often dive within sight of the boat. If you would like to stretch your legs, add a guided walk on Crescent Island, where giraffe, zebra, wildebeest and waterbuck graze and there are no lions, so you can walk among them on foot.

Hippos leave the water to graze at night, and at lakeside lodges they often wander across the lawns, which is why staff walk you to your room after dark.

This is one of your two longest drives (Day 9 is the other), so you set off straight after breakfast. The road climbs out of the Rift Valley, skirts Nairobi, where traffic decides the timing, and heads south into dry Maasai rangeland, with a lunch stop along the way. If you would rather not spend the day in the car, we can swap the last part for a flight from Nairobi's Wilson Airport.

As you get closer, Kilimanjaro fills the southern skyline. It stands across the border in Tanzania and, at 5,895 metres, is the highest mountain in Africa. Clouds often wrap the summit by midday, so do not be disappointed if it hides when you arrive: it usually shows itself early and late in the day.

After check-in there is time for a late-afternoon game drive, as the elephant families walk out of the swamps towards the woodland where they spend the night.

Be ready at first light: this is when the mountain is most often clear and the elephants walk out of the woodland towards the swamps. A line of them crossing the dry lake bed with Kilimanjaro behind is the picture most people come to Amboseli for, and early morning gives you the best chance of it.

Amboseli's elephants are among the most studied in Africa. Researchers have followed the same families here since 1972, and the herds are relaxed around vehicles, so you can watch calves play and big bulls feed at close range. Swamps fed by underground water from Kilimanjaro stay green even in the driest months, drawing hippos, buffalo, pelicans and herons. Mid-morning, climb Observation Hill on foot for a view across the swamps and plains.

After lunch and a rest at the lodge, you can visit a Maasai village near Amboseli, or stay by the pool, before your final game drive in Kenya. Tonight is your last dinner with your Kenyan guide.

Today you change countries, and it is the longest day of the trip, so we leave at dawn with a packed breakfast. You cross the park to the Meshanani gate (allow longer from the lodges on the Kimana side), then drive to Namanga on a road that is partly gravel. Namanga is a one-stop border post, so leaving Kenya and entering Tanzania are handled in one place. Keep your passport, Tanzania visa, yellow fever certificate and Tanzania travel insurance certificate to hand, and we will help you through the paperwork.

Tanzania requires Tanzanian-registered vehicles and licensed guides in its parks, so at Namanga you say goodbye to your Kenyan guide and change to a second private Land Cruiser with a Tanzanian driver-guide. From the border the road runs south past Longido, with Mount Meru rising ahead as you near Arusha, where you stop for lunch, then west to Tarangire.

Expect about six to seven hours of driving plus the border and lunch. You reach your lodge by early evening, in time for a cold drink as the sun goes down behind the baobabs. If you would rather split the day, we can add a night in Arusha and drop a night in Tarangire, or fly one leg; tell us when you book.

Tarangire looks like nowhere else on this trip. Giant baobabs, some of them centuries old, stand across the grassland, and the Tarangire River runs through the middle of the park. In the dry months, roughly June to October, the river is the only reliable water for miles, and elephants come to it in large herds, along with buffalo, zebra, wildebeest and giraffe. In the green months the herds spread out, the park turns lush, and you often have sightings to yourself.

Today is a full day in the park with a picnic lunch, following the river and the edges of the Silale swamp. Lions rest up in the shade along the river, leopards use the bigger trees, and the birdlife is outstanding, including the yellow-collared lovebird, found only in Tanzania.

Back at the lodge, dinner comes with very little light pollution; on a moonless night the Milky Way is bright overhead.

After a last morning drive in Tarangire, you head north to Mto wa Mbu, a busy market town at the foot of the Rift Valley wall whose name means "river of mosquitoes" in Swahili. It is known for its bananas, grown here in many varieties, and it is worth a stop to try some. A picnic lunch keeps the day moving.

Just past town is Lake Manyara National Park. You enter through a groundwater forest, fed by springs seeping from the escarpment, where baboon troops sit on the track and blue monkeys move through the canopy. Beyond it the park opens onto the lake shore, where elephants, buffalo and giraffe feed, hippos lie in the pool, and in some seasons flamingos gather in the shallows. Manyara's lions are known for climbing trees, though they do not do it on request, and sightings are never guaranteed. With young children, the Manyara drive can be dropped.

In the late afternoon you climb the escarpment to Karatu, a highland farming town among coffee estates. It is noticeably cooler up here, and evenings can be chilly enough for a fire.

You leave early and climb through cloud forest to the rim of the Ngorongoro Crater, more than 2,200 metres up. From the viewpoint the whole caldera opens below you, its floor about 600 metres down and close to 20 kilometres across, with a soda lake shining in the middle.

On the floor, the wildlife is concentrated in a space you can cross in an hour. Lions and spotted hyenas hunt among the buffalo, wildebeest and zebra; old elephant bulls with long tusks feed in the swamps; and the crater holds a small, closely protected population of black rhino, one of your best chances of seeing one on the whole trip. You will not see giraffes here: the crater walls are too steep for them. Lunch is a picnic at a spring-fed pool where hippos wallow. Eat inside the vehicle, because the black kites here are quick to snatch food from hands.

Vehicles may stay on the crater floor for up to six hours, so you climb out around midday and are back in Karatu with the afternoon free to relax in the garden or join a coffee farm tour.

We leave Karatu early so you are inside the Serengeti before the park gates close. The road climbs back to the crater rim, follows it round and then drops down the western side of the highlands, past Maasai herders and their cattle, onto the open plains. If you like, stop at Olduvai Gorge, where fossils found by the Leakey family changed the story of human origins; a small museum stands on the edge of the gorge.

Lunch is a picnic at Naabi Hill Gate, the main entrance to the Serengeti from this side, with a view over short-grass plains that seem to run to the horizon. Gate formalities at the crater and at Naabi can take half an hour or more in busy months. From December to March these southern plains can be covered with wildebeest and zebra. From Naabi you game drive the last stretch to Seronera, in the centre of the park, and reach camp in the late afternoon or early evening.

You have four nights here, which gives the Serengeti the time it deserves.

The Seronera River holds water in the central Serengeti all year, and where there is water there are predators. This is one of the best places in Africa to see big cats: lion prides lie up on the granite kopjes, leopards spend the heat of the day in the big trees along the river, and cheetahs hunt the open plains in daylight.

Your day follows the animals' rhythm: out at first light, back to camp for lunch or a picnic under an acacia, and out again as the heat drops. Depending on your lodge, the drive to the Seronera River takes anything from a few minutes to about 50 minutes, and we plan your game drives around that. Guides in the central Serengeti share news of sightings, so if a leopard comes down from its tree across the valley, you will hear about it.

If you want to see the plains from above, a dawn balloon flight can be arranged here too.

Well over a million wildebeest, with hundreds of thousands of zebra and gazelle, move around the Serengeti and the Maasai Mara in a loop that follows the rain. From December to March they are usually on the southern plains around Ndutu, where the calves are born from late January to March, with a peak around February. From about April to June they move north-west through the central and western Serengeti. From about July to October they are in the far north and across the border in the Mara, before heading south again in November.

Seronera sits in the middle of that loop. In some months the herds pass close by; in others they are a long drive away. Today your guide packs a picnic and heads for the best action within reach, whether that is the herds themselves or the predators that follow them. If your dates put the herds far from the centre, we will suggest moving one or two nights to a camp near them when you book.

Evenings in camp are unhurried: a drink by the fire as the plains go dark, then dinner. Lions and hyenas are often heard after dark.

On your last full day, head south to the Moru Kopjes, great granite outcrops rising out of the grass, with a picnic among the rocks. Lions use them as lookouts and klipspringers balance on the ledges. A small population of black rhino lives around Moru; they are shy and hard to spot, and your guide will tell you what has been seen recently. At Gong Rock you can see old Maasai rock paintings and hear the boulder ring when it is struck with a stone.

Come back across the plains in the afternoon for your final game drive, and stay out until the light turns gold. It is the best hour of the day for photographs, and often for cats on the move.

Pack tonight: tomorrow's light aircraft takes soft-sided bags only, with a weight limit per person that we confirm with your quote.

A morning game drive takes you to the Seronera airstrip, where you say goodbye to your Tanzanian driver-guide and board a scheduled light aircraft for the coast. Allow 20 to 50 minutes to reach the airstrip, depending on your lodge; we set the departure time around your flight. The flight may stop once or twice on the way, often at Arusha, and on a clear day you may see the crater highlands pass below. Your camp packs a lunch for the journey.

You land on Zanzibar in the afternoon or early evening, to warm, humid sea air. Keep your passport and yellow fever certificate handy, as officials may ask to see it. The transfer to your beach hotel takes from about 45 minutes to an hour and a quarter, depending on the coast, through villages and coconut groves.

Today has no start time. Many travellers spend a morning in Stone Town, the old heart of Zanzibar City and a UNESCO World Heritage Site, where carved wooden doors, narrow lanes and old merchants' houses show centuries of Swahili, Arab, Indian and European influence.

A spice farm tour pairs well with it: you taste cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon and vanilla straight from the plant and hear how spices made the island's fortune. If you stay in town into the evening, the food stalls at Forodhani Gardens on the seafront come alive at sunset.

Or ignore all of it and stay on the beach. After fifteen days of pre-dawn starts, nobody needs a reason to spend a day on the sand.

Zanzibar's reefs are made for snorkelling. A boat trip to Mnemba Atoll, off the north-east coast, puts you in clear water over coral and reef fish; turtles are regularly seen and dolphins sometimes. Morning trips usually get the calmest sea. Trips leave from the north and east coasts, and we arrange the transfer from your hotel.

Nature lovers should add Jozani Forest, part of Zanzibar's only national park and home to the Zanzibar red colobus, a monkey found nowhere else on earth. Trails lead through the forest and on to a boardwalk through the mangroves.

On the east coast the tide goes out a long way twice a day, uncovering rock pools and the seaweed farms that village women tend on the flats. There, swim at high tide, walk at low tide, and ask the hotel for the tide times. On the north-west coast at Kendwa the water stays swimmable all day.

Your last full day has no plan unless you want one. Swim, read, sleep in the shade or book a massage, and let the last three weeks settle.

For a final evening on the water, sunset dhow cruises sail from the north-west beaches around Kendwa and Nungwi, where the sun sets straight into the sea. If you are staying on the east coast, we can arrange the cruise with a road transfer.

Dinner tonight is your last in East Africa. Make it a long one.

Enjoy a final swim and a slow breakfast. We then transfer you to Abeid Amani Karume International Airport in time for your flight home, whether it leaves directly from Zanzibar or connects through Nairobi or Dar es Salaam.

Not ready to go home? We can add nights on the beach or in Stone Town. Either way, we would love to hear how it went.