The season of the wildebeest migration in July of 2023 brought me to the rolling plains of Amboseli and the pale-gold grasslands of the Maasai Mara in Kenya, East Africa. A friend with a heart and soul for adventure had fallen in love with Kenya in his early 20s and had since built a life in the Mara, carefully crafting a safari experience for like-minded souls with exclusive boutique safaris. 

In 2019, in our own equally remote island home in Far North Queensland Australia, Howard Saunders was visiting with his wife Steph and their two children Oliver and Halina. As so many like-minded adventurers do, Howard struck up a friendship with my parents Anna and Roy.

Upon finishing my law degree at Oxford, I yearned for a change of pace and reached out to Howard with an interest to come and help on his safaris. As Covid cooled and travel picked up again, Howard would be hitting the ground running in the season of 2023, and my passion and experience in cuisine and high-end hospitality would be a welcome addition to his team.

Within half an hour of touching down in Nairobi, one of Howard’s team had whisked me through immigration and sped me to Wilson airport, where domestic and private air travel go through. I met Howard on the tarmac and we took off in his Cessna 182, flying over the Great Rift Valley to his home near the Enonkishu Conservancy. We would spend a few weeks here; For Howard, Naretoi (the 1000 acres which borders Enonkishu) is home. For me, it was a wondrous place to acclimatise, learn my first phrases of Swahili, and get to grips with the complex safaris we had in store.

As the end of June approached, we returned to Nairobi. Nairobi is the beating heart of Kenya and the connective base where the mechanical pieces of a safari are put together. The office of Ker & Downey Safaris, the parent company founded in 1946 and hailed by many as the inventors of the modern-day safari, is situated in the Nairobi suburb of Karen. During the months of June through September, K&D is a bustle of activity as entire mobile camps are carefully planned and packed into enormous trucks, ready to be driven out to remote safari locations. Howard’s is one of only a dozen exclusive safari operators under the legendary K&D name.

From Nairobi and garbed in khaki, I began the long drive out to Amboseli, where we would be spending the first three nights of the trip. 

The Amboseli National Park sits on the border of Tanzania. Characterized by its flat and often dry expanses, Amboseli provides a dramatic backdrop for the elephants, wildebeest and zebra which roam its vast plains. The dust swirls and is carried into the atmosphere, creating a whimsical and rather romantic vista. Rolling into Howard’s camp, the looming outline of Kilimanjaro extends up into the sky above us. A few hundred feet away, a large bull elephant walks slowly past the camp, its heels creating silent puffs of dust which eddy in the fading light.

We are met by Mike, Howard’s camp manager, who offers to show me to my guide tent to wash off the dust. My canvas home sits nestled under the shade of a twisting Acacia tree. A small silver basin, filled with inviting fresh water, is propped on a little trivet outside the tent. The ‘windows’ are fly-screen mesh, allowing the breeze to keep the tent cool whilst deterring unwanted insects.

Meanwhile, Howard’s crew are in full motion. His team are a well-oiled machine; together, they work seamlessly to turn the stretch of trees and grassland into a fully-fledged canvas creation. 

Camps like Howard’s are the luxurious tip of the East African safari iceberg. Clients can expect a truly personalised, once-in-a-lifetime, guided experience in rustic luxury – and in close proximity to the Kenyan wildlife. 

Like the most intricate and elaborate of pop-up cards, Howard’s mobile camp unfolds before my eyes. Tents, furniture, linens and lights spring out of the trucks and into splendid being. By evening, a mess tent, guide tents, a kitchen and the luxurious client accommodation are ready, the latter with colourful bed linens smoothed and flowers arranged neatly by the wash basins. 

Walking through camp, and taking care to avoid the vervet monkeys which seem to find visitors most intriguing, Mike offers me a tour of the kitchen. Let me say, just once, that this is perhaps one of the most unique “kitchens” I have laid eyes upon. Two metal-topped tables, made of polished steel, one gas cooker, and the piece de resistance, the “oven” – a hot metal box on which coals are snuggled under and above. This camp kitchen is connected to a small canvas pantry where produce is carefully organised to maintain its freshness. The produce must last until we next make a trip to Nairobi to re-supply.

I pass the first night in my canvas home, listening to the grunting roar of a lion some ways off in the distance. A pearl-spotted owlet hoots from the branch above my tent, like a feathered sentinel. Sound travels far here, over the flat lands of Amboseli, and the nights are filled with activity and intrigue.

The next day, and with the guests arrival by small charter plane, our group is complete.

The day starts early on safari; Woken as the first red rays glow through the mesh of the tent, a tent attendant delivers a thermos of hot milky chai (a deliciously creamy tea made with hot milk instead of water) to your door. Wrapped in warm “shukas” (the traditional colourful shawls of the Maasai) to keep off the morning’s chill, we trundle out of camp before the sun has fully breached the horizon.

Our destination this morning is a nearby Maasai village, where Howard’s close relations with the local Maasai afford his clients a rare peek into the villagers’ extraordinary lives. On route however, our spotter’s eyes detect lion tracks – fresh enough that the dust has not had time to soften the imprints. Our two safari jeeps veer off the path and head into the scrub where the tracks lead.

This thrilling unpredictability, where the mornings and evenings are dictated by the exhilarating and capricious goings on of the wildlife, is what makes the safari so alluring: a lion making a kill of a wildebeest, a cheetah spotted with four cubs, flocks of flamingos taking flight from their aquatic oasis. The cycle of life runs, moment-to-moment, on its own rhythm out here, and for one week with Howard we are lucky enough to experience a part of it.

After our three nights are past, I hug the guests goodbye as they fly off to a lodge in the Borana Conservancy. I will be heading back to Nairobi with the crew for a re-supply, and will meet them in the Maasai Mara National Reserve.

In contrast to Amboseli, the Mara is lush and vibrant in its flora. Big cats (lions, cheetah and leopards) roam the grassy savannah where there are prey in their hundreds. Kiboko Camp, where we are settled, is set on the banks of the Mara river. Thirty feet below us, crocodiles and hippos lazily wallow in the flowing currents.

Independent of the extraordinary proximity of wildlife that is so captivating, I found myself both surprised and delighted by the culinary side of Howard’s safaris. Here, meals are memories. After a morning’s game drive, breakfast is often taken under an acacia tree. We are rarely alone in breaking our fast – a herd of almost one hundred zebra and wildebeest graze nearby, intermingled with a family of warthogs who are foraging on bended knee.

In the evenings, clients can wander over to the “mess tent” which has been beautifully lit with hurricane lamps. A long table, clothed in African linen, has been artfully decorated with guineafowl feathers, twisted wood and local flowers gathered from around the camp. Light flickers from candles glowing within large pearly ostrich eggs. We can hear the whoops of hyenas and – disconcertingly close – the trumpet-like grunts of hippos wallowing in the river below.

Dinners are served in our canvas sanctuary. Freshly baked dinner rolls, topped with rolled oats and sesame seeds, are present at every meal. The first course might be a sumptuous spinach and cheese souffle, or a chilled avocado gazpacho. This is then followed by a large cut of beef, marinated in ginger and soy and cooked over the hot coals of the oven. The meals display an artful mastery of fresh spices, honey and herbs. Drawing influences from Indian cuisine, curries are sumptuously seasoned and served with chapati – a flat bread made with flour and oil and lightly fried.

There is an innate and intuitive understanding of heat and gastronomic chemistry which belongs solely to these safari chefs, and in particular to Tom and Anthony. To produce some of the most divine and complex cuisine in difficult conditions, with rudimentary equipment, is an extraordinary feat; To eat their food – a humbling experience. 

The end of the safari comes too soon and we all exchange (tearful) goodbyes at the Mara airstrip. There is something here, something in the warmth of the people and in the cool evening air, which captures one’s heart. These stirrings are felt, and not forgotten. One simply has to return to feel it again.

As the safari season kicked in this past month, I’ve had some of my best ever lion viewings. Always one the most charismatic characters of the African “big game”, lions offer everything you’d want to take away from time on safari. Their size and power, their regal beauty, and the primal energy we experience when close to one stirs some deep inner animal instinct within us. It is a raw, wild feeling of connectedness to the African bush.

At first light in the Masai Mara, we drive out from our camp along the banks of the Mara River, hippos snorting their welcome, and the sun rising over the great plains. As we emerge we find three of the finest male lions in the Mara, part of an ever larger coalition of five that dominates the northern half of the western Mara Triangle. Striding along like the jungle kings they’re known as, they run into the one species that won’t get out of their way; elephants. We then get to see who the real kings are (or queens as it happens!), as the elephant matriarch and her sisters stand firm and watch the lions meekly take a wide detour around them. What a thrill watching such an encounter with colossal wildlife!

On to the Chyulu Hills, where, twenty years ago, lions had been persecuted and severely reduced in number. In one of the great success stories of Kenyan conservation, the combined work of the Lion Guardians program and Big Life Africa have led to the rebound of lions, back to their place as an apex predator in this ecosystem. Another morning drive with stunning dawn light and we find three magnificent sub-adult males. They are not quite ready to take their place with their own pride, but old enough to have to fend for themselves and hunt their own food. Watching these future kings as they set out from the security of their natal pride makes us realize what an enormous challenge it is to enter the sometimes savagely competitive environment they call home.

And in what now has to be my grand finale to any lion tales, at our final safari location this month we witnessed a lioness stalk and take down a fully grown wildebeest. Taking place mid morning in our own private 30,000 acre Kitirua Wildlife Conservancy in Amboseli, we were observing this lioness as she digested her last meal, thinking that she and her pride mates couldn’t possibly fit any more in their bursting bellies. Yet on seeing some wildebeest move into the longer grass, that hunting instinct took over, and as she passed within meters of our safari jeep we saw that primal look come into focus in her amber lion eyes. Stalking with utter patience and stealth, this seasoned lioness was able to close in on the unsuspecting prey and take it down. It can be hard to watch nature unfold in the raw, but the ever present circle of life closed this day, and the pride’s cubs enjoyed this next meal, bringing them one day closer to successfully moving through their own tenuous journey to adulthood.

Perhaps once in a lifetime – or possibly once a year – it feels right to push some boundaries. This can be at different levels, whether emotional, spiritual, or physical. For a year like 2020, I chose physical, and went all out to launch and participate in a wild run across 50km of spectacular Mara savannah. Read my account of this “ultra” marathon race across the great plains of the Maasai Mara that benefitted the rangers of the conservancies here in Wilder magazine (www.wilder-mag.com/magazine). It was brutally hot and the final 10km was much more challenging than I expected, but I managed to complete the full 50km…and I am already thinking about how to train better for the next one!

Learn more about our partner charity, For Rangers, on their website (https://www.forrangers.com/home), and here is a fantastic highlights video from race day:

Since moving to the Mara, we have heard occasional reports of sightings of the rare and endangered African wild dog in the hills above us. Beautifully colored in their mottled coats, small groups from perhaps a single pack are seen every few months as they hunt antelopes on the bushy hillsides to the north and east of the Mara – their remaining hold-out in the region. Since they disappeared from the great plains of the Mara’s grasslands in the early 1990s, due to a rabies outbreak, this pack has eked out an existence on the outskirts of Enonkishu and the other conservancies, away from the higher densities of lions.

So, we were thrilled a few weeks ago when we drove out one rainy afternoon and were treated to some fantastic viewing of three wild dogs who had killed a male impala. And while a hyena had taken a good chunk of the feast by the time we got there, the dogs were excitedly bouncing and twittering around, enjoying other morsels from their meal. We shared this spectacular viewing with Oliver and Halina, who were seeing this species for the first time – and it was the first time Steph had ever seen the Mara wild dogs, in twenty years! This sighting has reinforced our commitment to providing free rabies vaccinations to domestic dogs and cats in our area every year, to prevent the disease from spilling over into the wild dogs again. We’ll be helping the vets again this December! 

Here is a short video clip:

Not every meal at our home in the Mara finishes with the sounds of lions and hyenas scrapping over a kill, but one recent night it certainly did! Just after 8pm, as we were about to do the dishes, the unique, eerie cackling of hyenas and the sharp, aggressive growls of lions drifted into our open kitchen. We knew there was about to be some super carnivore action, so we grabbed the cameras and binoculars and our carnivore-loving family headed out to investigate. On arrival we witnessed the classic head to head combat of lions and hyenas in the dark April drizzle. Of all the up-close wildlife viewings in Africa, it’s an unbeatable experience of pure, primal competition as ferocious hyenas rally their clan members for what they know will be some rough and tumble. Sure enough, several of them are pummeled, clawed, and even bitten by the lions, but they get their own back when they eventually overpower the big cats with a few good butt-bites to see them off. After raging back and forth for close to an hour, with yelps and growls the lions eventually retreat, not wanting to risk serious injury.  

For our kids, ending the day with such a wild and dramatic scene less than a mile from the house is a pretty good consolation after the challenge of school closures and their online classrooms. Being stuck at home for nine onths could be a lot worse! Sound on for these fun videos!

Turn up the volume and enjoy these three videos from the night of war!

Good viewings of cheetahs always add enormously to the safari experience. Over the past twelve months, with so much time at our Mara home in Enonkishu, we’ve had the privilege of regular sightings of one female who has defied the odds and raised six cubs through their first year. Typically, cheetah mothers lose many of their young. But Kisaru, fast becoming our local mascot, has become so adept in her hunting of gazelles and impala that she has kept her brood of six alive and well. 

In December, we had the excitement of observing this cheetah family from our rooftop as Kisaru chased some antelope into the nearby bush. Since then she’s made regular appearances nearby, providing wonderful viewings for those of us lucky enough to call this paradise home; I only wish I could be sharing it all with guests who would have been on safari with me over the past couple of months! At least some good friends from Australia enjoyed a visit in February before the pandemic, and got to see our resident cheetah family enjoy a big meal after Kisaru made a swift, successful hunt of an unsuspecting impala.

Every time I explore the vast Mara-Serengeti ecosystem I’m reminded that it truly does hold the greatest wildlife viewings on Earth. We’ve preserved some really fun and memorable moments of this magical place during a recent safari. Depending on the time of year, the Mara or the Serengeti is an absolute must for any inaugural safari, and perhaps even for a second or third safari as well! A few days under canvas in the heart of this region will be rewarded with outstanding big cat viewing, and always the chance of witnessing their mesmerizing predatory behavior.

During the rainy season over April, I kept busy working on my flying hours in my (1957) Cessna 182, 5Y-KUC, known to the family now as “Uncle Charlie.” A vintage aircraft with the latest GPS navigation systems (and a new engine!) has made for some spectacular and safe flying over what I consider the most impressive landscapes in Africa. One of these flights included flying Halina over the Great Rift Valley and up to her first pony camp near Mt. Kenya – truly a stunning location to ride, fly, hike, fish, and of course enjoy the abundant wildlife that make Kenya so unique. While Halina and I were at pony camp, Oliver and Stephanie kept busy at home, graphing animal numbers and rainfall, as well as cataloging the fascinating night visitors captured with our remote sensing camera traps; trundling aardvarks, diminutive dik-diks, and hyena-chasing-hippos amongst them!

 

The Mara continues to be one of the best places on the planet to observe large carnivores. On a wonderful safari in the Mara Triangle last month, we caught up with a lovely leopard and her two full-grown cubs as well as this magnificent pair of lions on their honeymoon. Thanks to Michael Lorentz for the image and video!

Lions on their honeymoon in the Mara Triangle from Stephanie Dloniak on Vimeo.