The savanna, on its own schedule

Uganda's largest and oldest park, split by the Victoria Nile as it forces itself through a seven-metre gorge and detonates into the Rift Valley below. Game drives on the northern bank turn up elephant, giraffe, buffalo and lion across open savanna; the afternoon launch cruise runs to the foot of the falls past hippo pods and basking crocodile. The Delta stretch is one of the last reliable places on earth to see the shoebill.

Uganda's most popular savanna reserve sits beneath the Rwenzori range between lakes George and Edward. The Kazinga Channel cruise delivers density you rarely see anywhere else — elephant, buffalo and hippo along a single stretch of shoreline. In the southern Ishasha sector the lions climb fig trees and drape themselves across the branches through the heat of the day, a behaviour recorded in only a handful of places worldwide.

Uganda's most remote park and, by common consent, its most beautiful — a broad savanna in the far northeast ringed by mountains, running to the South Sudan border. Isolation is the point: you can go a full day without meeting another vehicle. Kidepo holds species found nowhere else in the country, including cheetah and ostrich, alongside big lion prides and enormous buffalo herds on the Narus Valley floor.

Compact, accessible and the only Ugandan park with impala and large zebra herds, sitting conveniently on the road between Kampala and the southwest. Because there are no elephant or lion across much of it, Mburo permits what most parks cannot: walking safaris, horseback rides and night drives. An excellent first or last stop on a longer itinerary.

The northern reach of the Serengeti ecosystem and the stage for the Great Migration river crossings between roughly July and October, when close to two million wildebeest and zebra run the gauntlet of the Mara River. Outside migration season the Mara still holds the densest big-cat population in Kenya — lion, cheetah and leopard on open grassland that seems built for watching them.

The elephant park, and the one that gives you the photograph you already have in your head: big tuskers crossing dust and swamp with Kilimanjaro filling the sky behind them. Amboseli's herds are among the most studied on earth and remarkably relaxed around vehicles. The mountain hides in cloud through the middle of the day, so the light you want is at dawn and again at dusk.

Fourteen thousand square kilometres of grassland carrying the largest terrestrial mammal migration on earth. The name comes from the Maasai siringet — the place where the land runs on forever — and the plains genuinely deliver that. Where you go depends entirely on when you come: calving on the southern short-grass plains around February, the western corridor mid-year, the northern Mara River crossings from August.

The world's largest intact volcanic caldera — 260 square kilometres of crater floor 600m below the rim, holding roughly 25,000 large animals that mostly never leave. It is the surest place in East Africa to see black rhino, and one of very few where lion, elephant, buffalo, leopard and rhino occupy a single enclosed bowl. Descending through cloud forest at dawn into that natural amphitheatre is the moment people remember.