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, unpack properly, and get your bearings. In the evening your guide meets you for a full briefing over dinner: the route, the parks, what to expect, and the small practical things that make a week on safari run smoothly. Ask everything. Dinner and overnight in Arusha.

After a relaxed breakfast we drive southwest to Tarangire National Park, arriving in time for lunch. Tarangire is the elephant park, and in the dry season the herds gather along the river in numbers that are hard to believe until you are sitting in front of them, moving between baobabs that have stood a thousand years. Lion, leopard and giraffe are here too. A full afternoon of game driving, then we drive north and climb the Rift Valley escarpment above Lake Manyara. Dinner and overnight on the escarpment.

We drive across the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, stopping at the crater rim viewpoint for your first look down into the caldera, then descend onto the open plains beyond. We enter the Serengeti at Naabi Hill Gate, stop for a picnic lunch, and climb the kopje for a first sight of plains that genuinely run to the horizon. From there the afternoon is a game drive as we travel into the Seronera valley, the heart of the park and the richest big-cat country in it. Dinner and overnight in the central Serengeti.

A full day, with nowhere to be and no distance to cover. 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 scattered across the plains. This is one of the best places in Africa to find leopard, draped along the branch of a sausage tree, and the resident lion prides here are large and entirely unbothered by vehicles. Cheetah hunt the open grassland. Picnic lunch in the bush. Overnight in the central Serengeti.

A second full day, which is what separates this safari from most. Three nights in the Serengeti means you are no longer visiting it — you are living in it, and you begin to read it. Your guide can now take you further out: to the hippo pools, to the quieter country away from the main circuits, or simply back to whatever you found yesterday and want to see again. This is the day people remember, precisely because nothing about it is rushed. 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 population of wildlife that never leaves: black rhino, big-maned lion, elephant with heavy tusks, buffalo, and flamingo massed on the shallow soda lake. Very few places let you see so much in so small a space. We climb out in the late afternoon. Dinner and overnight in the highlands.

A relaxed final morning at Lake Manyara National Park, a short drive down from the highlands. Manyara is small but strikingly varied, moving from groundwater forest full of blue monkeys and baboons to open floodplain, with the Rift Valley escarpment rising behind it and flamingos massed on the soda lake. It is best known for its tree-climbing lions, unusual behaviour found in very few places on earth. After a morning game drive and lunch, we drive back to Arusha, or on to Kilimanjaro International Airport for your flight.