Tanzania

Tanzania holds, within a single country, the safari most travellers carry in their heads before they have ever booked one. The Serengeti and the Ngorongoro Crater are the headline, and they earn it — the crater a collapsed caldera dense with wildlife, the Serengeti the stage for the great wildebeest migration that loops across it and the Masai Mara each year.

Beyond the northern circuit the country opens out. The southern parks — Nyerere and Ruaha — are wilder, emptier and a different kind of trip. Kilimanjaro, the continent's high point, stands on the country's northern edge. And off the coast, the Zanzibar archipelago is a destination in its own right: Stone Town's coral-stone lanes and Swahili-Arab-Indian layering, spice farms inland, and reef-fringed beaches that make it the natural soft landing after the dust of a safari.

June through October is the dry season and the prime game-viewing window — the bush thins, the animals concentrate at water, and the migration timing falls within it. Zanzibar runs well year-round, with its own short rains to plan around.