You are met on arrival at Kilimanjaro International Airport and driven to your hotel in Arusha, the town at the foot of Mount Meru where every northern safari begins. The rest of the day is yours to rest after the flight. In the evening your guide will meet you for a full briefing: the route, the parks, what to expect at Lake Eyasi, and the practical things that make a safari run smoothly. Take the chance to ask everything. Dinner and overnight in Arusha.

After breakfast we drive southwest to Tarangire National Park, arriving in time for a picnic lunch. Tarangire is the elephant park, and in the dry season the herds gather in extraordinary numbers along the Tarangire River, moving between baobabs that have stood for over a thousand years. You may also find lion, leopard, giraffe, and the fringe-eared oryx found nowhere else on the northern circuit. A full afternoon of game driving through the river valley follows, before we leave the park. Dinner and overnight near Tarangire.

We drive across the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, stopping at the crater rim viewpoint, then descend onto the open plains and enter the Serengeti at Naabi Hill Gate. Picnic lunch at the gate, with a short climb up the kopje for your first sight of plains that genuinely run to the horizon. From there the whole afternoon is a game drive as we travel into the Seronera valley, the heart of the park and its richest big-cat country. Watch the rocks for lion. Dinner and overnight in the central Serengeti.

A full day in the Serengeti with nowhere else to be. We game drive from first light, when the cats are still active and the light is at its best, working the Seronera river valley and the granite kopjes that punctuate the plains. This is one of the best places in Africa to find leopard, draped in the branches of a sausage tree, and the resident lion prides here are large and habituated to vehicles. Cheetah hunt the open grassland. Picnic lunch in the bush. Dinner and overnight in the central Serengeti.

An early game drive as we leave the Serengeti, then we climb back into the Ngorongoro highlands and descend six hundred metres to the crater floor. The Ngorongoro Crater is an intact volcanic caldera holding a dense, resident population of wildlife that never leaves: black rhino, big-maned lion, elephant with heavy tusks, buffalo, and flamingo on the shallow soda lake. Few places let you see so much in so small a space. We climb out in the late afternoon and continue to Karatu. Dinner and overnight in Karatu.

An early start for Lake Eyasi, where the Hadzabe still live largely as hunter-gatherers, one of the last communities on earth to do so. You join a small group at dawn, when they set out to hunt with bows they make themselves, and you walk with them and listen. Afterwards we visit the neighbouring Datoga, pastoralists and skilled blacksmiths who forge arrowheads from scrap metal at an open fire. This is a morning of meeting people, not watching a performance. We then drive back to Arusha or the airport.