Serengeti

The name is Maa — siringet, the place where the land runs on forever — and the first hour inside the park is mostly an adjustment to scale. The southern plains are almost treeless, a shortgrass sheet over volcanic ash laid down by Ngorongoro's eruptions, broken only by kopjes: granite islands worn smooth, which hold water, shade and very often lions.

It is Tanzania's oldest national park, gazetted in 1951, and its ecosystem does not stop at the boundary — it runs north into Kenya's Maasai Mara and south into the Ngorongoro highlands. That is what makes the migration possible: roughly two million wildebeest, zebra and gazelle moving in a rough annual circle, following grass that follows rain. It is not a single event and it has no timetable. Asking when the migration happens is the wrong question; asking where the herds are this month is the right one.

The park divides into country that behaves quite differently. Seronera in the centre holds water year-round and is the most reliable for big cats. The western corridor follows the Grumeti River towards Lake Victoria. The north, around Kogatende, is where the Mara River crossings happen between roughly July and October — the part everybody has seen on television, and the part that involves a great deal of waiting.