Serengeti, Kruger, Vic Falls & Cape

Located in Tanzania North, Arusha is a significant and relatively pleasant town, the start point for safaris into the Serengeti region, with guest accommodation in a good range of largely rural lodges. Overnight stops are frequently needed here in order to make flight connections.

Serengeti Mara is the prime but potentially busy area for migration herds and river crossings during the Jul-Nov dry season and a wonderful quiet backwater at other times, with guest accommodation in around 30 small lodges and camps, offering a good range of safari experiences.

Serengeti Southcentral is one of the most magical of areas, with migration calving Dec-Mar, superb Maasai interaction, incredible palaeontology and just two rather cool mid-priced lodges.

Situated immediately to the south of Serengeti, the Ngorongoro Crater is a mind-bogglingly amazing place, packed with wildlife year round. Guest accommodation is in a diverse range of camps and lodges, offering a range of safari, active and cultural activities. But there are significant traffic issues.

Set to the northeast of South Africa, Johannesburg is the great commercial heart of the country and the main transport hub, a sprawling mess of a place, scarred through its heart by the gold mines. It is not somewhere safari travellers tend to linger too long, although the Cradle of Mankind may be worth a visit.

Set in the northeast of South Africa, Sabi Sand is the premium private safari reserve to the west of Kruger National Park, with extremely rich and accessible wildlife and containing the lion's share of the region's high quality lodges.

Set in the northeast of South Africa, Timbavati is a very strong private safari reserve to the west of Kruger National Park, containing a full range of safari wildlife and hosting a very strong range of relatively well-priced lodges.

Set in the northwest corner of Zimbabwe, across the river from Zambia, Victoria Falls is one of the most alluring locations in Africa, surprisingly pleasant and undeveloped, with guest accommodation in around 20 diverse hotels and lodges, offering a very wide range of safari, cultural and adrenaline-based activities.

Set in the Western Cape of South Africa, Cape Town is a fabulous, fascinating city, tucked in the folds of a very beautiful national park, where you are never short of a view and never more than a short walk away from an epic hiking trail. There's so much to see and do that a few nights will only enable you to scratch the surface.