Six countries
What each country is actually best at
Not a ranking. Six places that do genuinely different things, and the honest reason to choose each.
Every country here is worth a trip. The question is never which is best — it is which is best for what you want, in the month you can travel, at the amount you want to spend. These are the short answers.
Kenya
The most varied safari country in East Africa, and the easiest to get into and around. The Masai Mara has the highest density of big cats you will find anywhere; the private conservancies beside it allow walking, night drives and off-road driving that the reserve itself does not; and the Indian Ocean coast is a two-hour flight from any of it.
It is also where our partner agency is based, which means the deepest knowledge and the most hands-on service we can offer anywhere.
Tanzania
Scale. The Serengeti is vast in a way the Mara is not, the Ngorongoro Crater has no equivalent, and the southern and western parks are genuinely remote. The migration spends more of the year here than in Kenya, including the calving in February.
Against that: it is more expensive than Kenya for a comparable camp, and distances mean more flying.
Rwanda
Mountain gorillas, an hour at a time, and the shortest, easiest, most comfortable route to them. Add Nyungwe for chimpanzees and canopy forest, and Lake Kivu to stop moving for a few days.
Rwanda is small, clean, safe and unusually easy to travel, which is why it suits short trips and honeymoons. The gorilla permit is the highest single-item cost in African safari travel, and it is worth it.
Uganda
The same gorillas at a lower permit price, in wilder, steeper, wetter forest — plus chimpanzees at Kibale, tree-climbing lions in Ishasha and the Nile at Murchison. More effort, more variety, fewer people.
Choose Uganda over Rwanda if the trekking itself matters more than the ease of getting to it.
Botswana
Water, space and very few people. The Okavango Delta floods in the dry season, which is the reverse of everywhere else and the reason it works: game concentrates on permanent water while the rest of the region dries out. Camps sit on private concessions with strict limits on how many beds each one may have.
It is the most expensive safari country in this list, deliberately so, and the reason is exactly what you are paying for — fewer vehicles, more land.
Zanzibar
The place a safari ends. An hour from Dar or Arusha, forty minutes from the Serengeti’s airstrips, and an entirely different kind of week: reef, dhows, Stone Town and nothing to be up early for.
The most common good combination
One safari country properly, then the coast. Six or seven nights in the bush, four or five by the sea, and one internal flight between them.
It works because the two halves are genuinely different, and because the beach half repairs the sleep the bush half costs you.
More from our Africa guides
Guides to each of these
Each of these is a focused guide we publish. Same Africa specialist behind every enquiry.
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