Serengeti

People talk about the Serengeti as one place. In practice it is four, and which one you book decides what you see. Journey times between them are long — half a day between the south and the north is normal — so a short trip that tries to cover all four mostly sees the road.

Seronera and the central valley. The middle of the park, where the plains meet the woodland and the Seronera river holds water all year. Resident game stays here whatever the herds are doing, which makes it the safest bet for lion, leopard and cheetah on a short visit. It is also the busiest part of the park, with the most lodges, the main airstrip and the visitor centre.

The southern plains. Treeless short grass on volcanic ash, running down to Ndutu. Empty-looking for much of the year and then covered in animals between about December and March, when the herds come down to calve. Note that much of the Ndutu calving ground lies across the boundary in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, under different rules and fees.

The western corridor. A long arm following the Grumeti river almost to Lake Victoria, with riverine forest, black-cotton soil that turns to glue in the rains, and very large crocodiles. The herds pass through roughly May to July.

The north, around Kogatende and Lobo. Rolling hills, more trees, and the Mara river, where the crossings happen from about July to October. It is the farthest from Arusha — most people fly — and it is where the park runs into Kenya's Maasai Mara.

The migration is a continuous circuit, not an event, and it is driven by rain — so it runs early in some years and late in others. The pattern below is the usual one. It is a guide to probability, not a timetable, and any operator who promises you a river crossing on a given date is selling something they do not control.

TANAPA puts the moving population at over 1.5 million wildebeest with hundreds of thousands of zebra, gazelle and eland; most scientific counts give about 1.3 million wildebeest. Either way, the herds are spread over tens of kilometres, and you see a part of it, never the whole.

The Serengeti is not empty between crossings. It holds resident populations of everything, and the predator density is what the park is actually famous for among people who study it. TANAPA counts over 28 herbivore species and more than 540 bird species.

Lions are the park's signature animal, and the Serengeti Lion Project has followed individually known prides since the 1960s — one of the longest continuous studies of any wild mammal anywhere. Figures of 3,000 to 4,000 lions in the wider ecosystem are widely quoted, but they are not the result of a single census; treat them as an order of magnitude rather than a count.

Cheetah favour the open south, where they can see and run. Leopard are most often found along the Seronera river, draped in the sausage trees. Black rhino survive in small, heavily protected numbers and are rarely seen. Beyond the cats, the park has very large herds of buffalo, giraffe in the woodland, hippo pools at Retima, and both Nile and marsh crocodile in the rivers.

The Serengeti was first protected as a game reserve under British rule and became a national park in 1951. In 1959 the park was reorganised into roughly its present shape: the eastern highlands were split off as the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, and the Maasai who had lived and grazed inside the new park boundary were moved out of it. That decision is the root of a dispute that has never gone away, and the reason Ngorongoro is run under a different law that still permits pastoralists inside it.

The park's fame is partly the work of one film. Bernhard and Michael Grzimek, a German zoologist and his son, surveyed the migration from a zebra-striped light aircraft and made Serengeti Shall Never Die, which won an Academy Award in 1960. Michael was killed in a crash during the filming. The phrase is still TANAPA's official slogan for the park.

UNESCO inscribed the Serengeti as a World Heritage Site in 1981, and it is also a Biosphere Reserve. The site's standing has twice been tested by road plans. A proposal for a commercial highway across the northern wilderness was ruled unlawful by the East African Court of Justice in June 2014, in a case brought by the African Network for Animal Welfare; the court barred a bitumen highway through the park, though it did not stop the upgrading of existing tracks. Poaching of meat and of elephant ivory remains the other standing pressure.

By road from Arusha it is five to seven hours to the Naabi Hill gate, the main eastern entrance, through Ngorongoro — which means paying to transit the conservation area as well. Ndabaka gate in the west is about two hours from Mwanza, which is the cheaper way in if you are coming from the lake. Klein's gate serves the north-east.

By air there are scheduled flights from Arusha and Zanzibar to Seronera, Kogatende, Grumeti and Ndutu. Flying is the usual answer for the north; road transfers that far eat two days.

Fees are set by the government and charged for each 24 hours. TANAPA's published schedule for 2023/24 — the most recent it has issued, and a schedule to Government Notice 490A of 2020 — puts the Serengeti conservation fee for a non-East African adult at USD 70 in peak season and USD 60 in low, with USD 20 for children aged 5 to 15 and much lower rates for East African citizens. All of it is quoted exclusive of 18 per cent VAT, so the figure you actually pay is USD 82.60 and USD 70.80.

That VAT line is the reason operators seem to contradict each other. One quotes 70, another 82.60, and both are describing the same official fee. If a quote does not say which it is, ask.

The seasons are not what you would guess. TANAPA's low season is only 15 March to 15 May; everything else, 16 May to 14 March, is peak. The green months from November to February are charged at the full rate.

Camping or concession fees are charged separately if you sleep inside the park.

The park is cashless: fees are paid by card or mobile money against a government control number, not in cash at the gate.

Accommodation falls into four kinds. Public campsites are the cheapest and the most basic, booked through TANAPA. Special campsites are unserviced sites taken exclusively by one group. Permanent lodges cluster around Seronera and on the northern and western hills. Mobile tented camps move with the season — north in the crossing months, south for the calving — and are the usual answer for people who want to be where the herds are.

Staying just outside the boundary, in the Ikona or Grumeti community areas or towards Loliondo, is often cheaper and allows night drives and walks that are not permitted inside the national park. The trade-off is the drive to the gate each morning.