Serengeti National Park

Tanzania's oldest and most popular national park, the Serengeti is massive in size, 14,763 sq km (5,700 sq miles). Famed for its annual migration, when some six million hooves pound the open plains, as more than 200,000 zebra and 300,000 Thomson's gazelle join the wildebeest's trek for fresh grazing. The southern plains of the Serengeti are very fertile but they need rains to ripen the grass for a massive population of grazers. The "short" or light rains fall in November and December (sometimes as early as October) and draw the migration south from Kenya's Maasai Mara down the eastern side of Tanzania's Serengeti into the southern, sweet, short-grass plains. The wildebeest and other ungulates settle in the southern plains between about January and April. Calving occurs early in the new year to give the babies a chance to fatten up quickly on the nutritious vegetation.

In April and May the "long" or heavy rains set in and the depleted southern plains are less attractive than the long grass plains up in the western corridor, so the migration starts moving north west into the Grumeti corridor (western Serengeti). The herds continue to move north as the grass is exhausted. Plentiful rains will keep the herds in the south longer, or a dry season will send them north more quickly to the Mbalageti, Grumeti and Mara rivers. By August and September the green plains of Masai Mara bekon and mass river crossings begin across the Grumeti and Mara Rivers as the migration heads back into Kenya. The Mara is usually at its best in August, September and October.

Yet even when the migration is quiet, the Serengeti offers the most expansive game-viewing in Africa: great herds of buffalo, smaller groups of elephant and giraffe, and thousands upon thousands of eland, topi, kongoni, impala and Grant's gazelle. The spectacle of predator versus prey dominates Tanzania's greatest park. Golden-maned lion prides feast on the abundance of plain grazers. Solitary leopards haunt the acacia trees lining the Seronera River, while a high density of cheetahs prowls the southeastern plains. Almost uniquely, all three African jackal species occur here, alongside the spotted hyena and a host of more elusive small predators, ranging from the insectivorous aardwolf to the beautiful serval cat.

But there is more to Serengeti than large mammals. Gaudy agama lizards and rock hyraxes scuffle around the surfaces of the park's isolated granite koppies. A full 100 varieties of dung beetle have been recorded, as have 500-plus bird species, ranging from the outsized ostrich and bizarre secretary bird of the open grassland, to the black eagles that soar effortlessly above the Lobo Hills. As enduring as the game-viewing is the liberating sense of space that characterises the Serengeti Plains, stretching across sunburnt savannah to a shimmering golden horizon at the end of the earth. Yet, after the rains, this golden expanse of grass is transformed into an endless green carpet flecked with wildflowers. And there are also wooded hills and towering termite mounds, rivers lined with fig trees and acacia woodland stained orange by dust.