Relatively few people do it, but the remote and starkly beautiful back route connecting Serengeti National Park to Arusha via Lake Natron ranks as one of the wildest drives you can undertake in East Africa.

Hemmed in by the sheer Rift Valley escarpment, Natron is a forbidding presence, thanks to its hypersaline water, which is too caustic to support any aquatic life other than flamingos and the cyanobacteria on which they feed. Red-robed Maasai lead herds of cattle and camels between the zebras and antelope that graze the surrounding arid plains. Rising above it all, Ol Doinyo Lengai, the Maasai ‘Mountain of God’, is an active volcano whose 9,710ft peak towers above the 1,970ft lakeshore.

Some of the world’s oldest known human footprints are preserved in an old lava flow between the mountain and the lake. Depending on current volcanic activity levels, it is possible to hike up the shadeless, ash-strewn slopes of Ol Doinyo Lengai, a tough five-to-six-hour ascent best undertaken at night.