7-Day Maasai Mara and Gorilla Trekking Safari

You'll land at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport where your guide meets you and transfers you into the city, a drive of around 40 minutes depending on traffic. The Ole Sereni Hotel sits alongside Nairobi National Park, so it is worth stepping onto your balcony before dinner to see whether giraffe or zebra are moving along the park boundary fence.

The rest of the day is unstructured, giving you time to recover from long-haul travel. Your guide will run through the details of the coming days over dinner, including what to pack for the Mara's dust and cooler early mornings, and what time you'll be collected for tomorrow's drive west.

After an early breakfast you'll set off for the Maasai Mara, a drive of five to six hours that drops out of Nairobi's highlands, crosses the Rift Valley escarpment and continues onto the open grassland of the reserve. Your guide will stop at a viewpoint over the Rift for photographs and again for lunch en route, and the tarmac gives way to dirt roads for the final stretch into the reserve.

You'll arrive at Mara Sopa Lodge in the afternoon in time to settle in before heading out on your first game drive as the light softens. The plains here hold large resident herds of wildebeest and zebra year-round, along with the Mara's well-known lion prides, and this first drive is as much about getting your bearings as spotting game before returning to the lodge for dinner.

You'll leave camp early for a morning game drive while the light is still low and predators are most active, heading out across the Mara's rolling grassland toward areas where lion and cheetah are regularly seen. Your guide will track fresh signs along the way, and you'll return to the lodge for a late breakfast once the heat sets in and the bush quiets down.

After lunch and a break, the afternoon drive pushes toward the Mara River, where hippo pods lie in the deeper pools and Nile crocodile bask on the banks, particularly if the wildebeest migration is passing through between July and October. Elephant, giraffe and topi are common across this stretch, and you'll head back to Mara Sopa Lodge as the sun drops toward the escarpment, timed for sundowners before dinner.

After breakfast you'll transfer to the Mara's airstrip for a short scheduled flight back to Nairobi, followed by an international connection to Entebbe, Uganda. Flight schedules vary, so your guide will confirm timings the evening before, but you should expect most of the day to go into these connections.

On arrival in Entebbe you'll be met and driven the short distance to Kampala, climbing to Cassia Lodge on the ridge above Murchison Bay, with views over Lake Victoria's inlets from the terrace. The evening is free to settle in after a long travel day, with dinner at the lodge and an early night ahead of the drive to Bwindi tomorrow.

You'll set off early for the drive to Bwindi Impenetrable National Park in the far southwest, a long day on the road of roughly eight to nine hours as the route climbs steadily from Kampala's outskirts through the terraced hills of southwestern Uganda. Your guide will break the drive with stops for lunch and to stretch your legs, and the scenery changes noticeably in the final hours as the road winds up into Bwindi's forested ridges.

You'll arrive at Rushaga Gorilla Lodge in the late afternoon, positioned near the Rushaga trailhead in the park's southern sector at an altitude that brings noticeably cooler air than Kampala. The evening is quiet, with a briefing from your guide on what to expect from tomorrow's trek and an early dinner before an early start.

After a briefing at the park headquarters, where rangers assign groups to specific gorilla families based on their last known location, you'll set off into the forest with a small group and an armed ranger guide. The terrain in Bwindi is steep and often muddy, and the trek can run from one to several hours through dense forest depending on where the gorillas have moved, so a reasonable level of fitness helps.

Once you locate the family you'll spend a permitted hour observing them at close range, watching young gorillas play and adults feed in the undergrowth, a moment most guests describe as the highlight of the trip. The walk back to Rushaga Gorilla Lodge follows, and the afternoon is free to rest before dinner, with your guide on hand to talk through what you saw.

You'll have breakfast at Rushaga Gorilla Lodge before setting off on the long drive back toward Kampala and Entebbe, retracing the route through southwestern Uganda's hill country and stopping for lunch along the way. The drive takes most of the day, so your guide will pace it to reach Entebbe in good time for your onward flight.

On arrival you'll be dropped at Entebbe International Airport for check-in, bringing the trip to a close. Depending on your flight time there may be a short window to relax near the lake before departure, and your guide will confirm the final arrangements the evening before to make sure the transfer runs smoothly.