Tanzania occupies a special place in the hearts of old and new Africa hands. Its towns and cities are a little less bustling than Kenya’s, and its enchanting gamelands are fully Kenya’s equal in natural plenitude and beauty.

Local safaris, whether private Custom or small group Classic Safaris, almost invariably pay their respects to Tanzania’s Serengeti, the southern half of the Serengeti-Maasai Mara ecosystem, the undisputed capital of the world’s animal kingdom. The Serengeti is amazing in its enormity, its almost infinite skies and long, golden reaches, its million-year quiet. It enraptures with moments of grace; we may well see, as Elspeth Huxley did: a “loping giraffe, like a tiger lily bending with dignity before a gusty breeze.” And then there’s the fabulous, animal-thronged Lost World of the Ngorongoro Crater, one of the world’s most magical places, where we especially (but hardly uniquely) appreciate something Isak Dinesen wrote, “The chief feature of the African landscape…was the air. Looking back on a sojourn in the African highlands, you are struck by the feeling of having lived for a time up in the air….You woke up in the morning and thought, Here I am, where I ought to be.”