Serengeti & Masai Mara

Straddling the border of Tanzania and Kenya, the Serengeti and Masai Mara form the greatest safari landscape on Earth, a seemingly endless expanse of golden grassland teeming with wildlife. This is the classic image of Africa, where lions, elephants, leopards, and vast herds move across the plains beneath enormous skies. The concentration and diversity of animals here are almost unmatched.

The region's headline event is the Great Migration, when well over a million wildebeest and zebra thunder across the plains in an endless search for grazing, braving crocodile-filled rivers along the way. Game drives at dawn and dusk, dramatic river crossings in season, hot-air balloon flights over the herds, and encounters with the Maasai people make for the trip of a lifetime.

Timing is everything on safari. The dry seasons, roughly June to October and again over the turn of the year, offer the best game viewing as animals gather at water sources, and the migration's movements shift with the rains, so the ideal window depends on which spectacle you most want to see.