East Africa’s Golden Savannahs

En route to Kenya and its capital city, Nairobi.

After landing in Nairobi, we’ll be escorted through the formalities by Micato staff and driven to Hemingways, our jet-lag soothing hotel in one of the capital’s lushest suburbs. (Just another of the many Micato Differences: amazingly quick and smooth touchdown-to-hotel transitions.)

The next day we’ll mingle with the kids and elders at the Micato-AmericaShare Harambee Centre, and head over to the Giraffe Centre (where we’ll hand-feed endangered Rothschild giraffes) and the home of Karen Blixen, now a lovingly restored museum. In 1937, Baroness Blixen (under the pen name Isak Dinesen) published Out of Africa, which many of us consider the most heart-stirring book ever written about the continent. And after a leisurely lunch at one of Nairobi’s stylish restaurants, we’ll return to Hemingways, inspired by our first experiences of African hospitality, by good food and conversation, eager and ready to embark on a classic African safari.

It’s fitting that our first camp is in Tsavo, an archetype of all that brings us to Africa’s astounding game lands. The Big Five are in numerous residence, along with the myriad of animals and birds, almost infinite skies, long, golden reaches and million-year quiet that, as Isak Dinesen wrote, “sooth the homesick soul.”

We and our Safari Director make unfailingly exciting game drives based from Finch Hattons Luxury Safari Camp, named for a man who held Tsavo close to his heart. Denys Finch Hatton, a charismatically jaunty British aristocrat was a pioneer of modern safari (and, as you may remember from the book or movie, was Isak Dinesen’s great and tragic love). Now part of Sir Richard Branson’s stellar Virgin Collection, Finch Hattons expertly combines deep respect for history and African culture with modernity and smilingly orchestrated luxury.

We fly from Tsavo to the Maasai Mara, the northern reaches of the Maasai Mara-Serengeti ecosystem, the greatest assembly of wild (and wondrous) animals on planet Earth. The Mara abounds with rolling grasslands, expressive acacia trees, sweeping vistas teeming with wildlife, and the rock islands, called kopjes, that Peter Matthiessen called “magnificent, harmonious stone gardens…[revealing] the bone of Africa.” And then there is one of Africa’s common but unforgettable sights: “the cumulus clouds that drift all day long across a sun-filled sky,” as Elspeth Huxley wrote in The Flame Trees of Thika, “remind[ing] me of huge swirls of whipped cream.”

While in the Mara, we’ll sweep in a hot-air balloon above these rolling grasslands (normally an additional cost, ballooning on East Africa’s Golden Savannahs is part of the luxe experience). And at flight’s end, we’ll savour a champagne breakfast; we’ll already be a little giddied by the plain’s beauty and our good fortune to be so welcome and at ease in its presence.

Our camp, Mahali Mzuri, is another Richard Branson gem, a winner of Condé Nast Traveler’s Reader’s Choice Awards for Favorite Safari Camp. It’s twelve innovatively designed tents and main lodge, connected by winsome walkways, are designed for full-tilt, reposeful luxury. (And, as we like to say, those tents resemble the common idea of “tent” about as much as a vintage Yugo resembles a Rolls-Royce Phantom).

Now south by air to the vast and fabled Serengeti, a place, wrote the great conservationist Bernhard Grzimek, “where you can feel the pulse of the Earth, the rhythm of life that has been playing out for millions of years.”

Our camp, the Elewana Serengeti Explorer, the newest addition to Elewana’s superb collection of camps and lodges, sits in serene isolation on the Nyaboro Hills, overlooking the auric plains, which we roam freely, watching elephants make their mammoth rounds, cheetahs atop rocky kopjes, alert to every shifting molecule below, long, orderly lines of zebras and wildebeest as they trace their ancient migratory paths. We delight in hippos frolicking, fighting, and snoozing in waterholes, and gaze upward as mountainous afternoon clouds that pile up over the Ngorongoro Crater, our next stop on this eventful, revelatory safari.

We fly to flamingo-thronged Lake Manyara, and drive up to Ngorongoro Lodge Melia, a lovely, boutiquey sanctuary brightened by original African artwork and tremendous views. And from there we hop into our safari vehicles and wend our way a couple of thousand feet up, then thrillingly down into the Ngorongoro Crater, like Manyara, gigantic evidence of Africa’s eons-long splitting apart.

That tear in the earth’s surface has created the Great Rift Valley, a gargantuan parting of the ways of the Nubian Plate, which carries most of the continent, and the Somali Plate, on which fitfully rests most of far-eastern Africa. As one tectonic plate moves east, and one west, the slender (but sometimes very deep) Rift Lakes are formed — Tanganyika, Turkana, and Manyara among many — along a 4,000-mile-long fracture. And an unimaginable grinding creates volcanoes like Kilimanjaro and Mount Kenya, and, as we’ll see and experience today, the world’s largest intact caldera, a 100-square-mile, 2000-foot-deep bowl, all that’s left of a mountain that, before a stupendous explosion a couple of million years ago, rivaled Kilimanjaro in grandeur.

Now peacefully at rest, Ngorongoro abounds with life and beauty. (It was unknown to the outside world until 1892, which which helps account for its wealth of wildlife, everything from a burgeoning lion population to fine strands of flamingos).

After flying back to Nairobi, we’ll have day rooms–with full amenities– at the Four Points Nairobi Airport or the Norfolk before being escorted by our Safari Director for our late night flights home.

Connect with your flights home and sweetly dream, perhaps, about your next Micato safari.