The Hemingway Wing Safari

We board our flight and enjoy the anticipation of Africa.

We’ll be met by our Micato Safari Director and whisked away to the welcoming Kempinski Villa Rosa. We’ll visit the impressive National Museum of Kenya, make a joyously inspirational visit to Micato-AmericaShare’s Harambee Centre, visit the Giraffe Centre, lunch at one of Nairobi’s most delightfully cutting-edge restaurants, and pay our respects at the home of Out of Africa‘s Isak Dinesen (who wrote as Karen Blixen; Hemingway said more than once, should have received the Nobel Prize for literature instead of him).

We fly north from Nairobi to the Laikipia Plateau. It’s a short, but momentous flight,
taking us from Nairobi’s urban whirl to a vast, animal-abounding wilderness graced with views
of the more-than-iconic Mount Kenya and the monumental clouds that seem to drift up from its 17,000-foot summit. We are, gleefully, in the Africa we’ve been carrying around in our imagination since we were children.

Our haven in this marvelous world-of-its-own is the excellent Mutara Camp, set high atop a cliff overlooking the Plateau, and the only camp (or lodge or pretty much any modern artifact) in the 20,000-acre Mutara Conservancy, a fruitful partnership between the local people and Mutara’s diligently eco- and heritage-aware owners. Spiraling down from the clifftop, we make game drives in Laikipia, encountering in solitude its fabulous plentitude of large (and cunningly small) mammals (all the Big Five, including some especially svelte leopards) who are just the headliners in a fabulous cast of very natural, very intriguing characters. (Some travellers, having seen and appreciated the Big Five, begin a more difficult search for the Little Five, whose identities we will divulge in Tanzania Spectacular.)

South by air to the Maasai Mara, the northern reaches of the Serengeti–Maasai Mara ecosystem, earth’s richest wildlife habitat. Our base for explorations in the fabled Mara is the Olare Mara Kempinski, a small tented camp in the soothingly luxurious Kempinski style. Olare Mara’s tents are built on wooden platforms on the banks of the Ntiakitiak River, giving us veranda views of hippos galumphing and elephants joyously bathing in the river. And it’s a great jumping-off place for extraordinary game drives in the mixed land- and waterscapes of the Mara.

We’ll visit a traditional Maasai village as we wend our way through this natural wonderland, the kind of place that moved Hemingway to write, “I loved this country and I felt at home and where a man feels at home, outside of where he’s born, is where he’s meant to go.”

“How can one convey the power of Serengeti?” asked Cyril Connolly in The Evening Colonnade. “It is an immense, limitless lawn, under a marquee of sky. . . .The light is dazzling, the air delectable; kopjes rise out of the grass at far intervals, some wooded; the magic of the American prairie here blends with the other magic of the animals as they existed before man.”

The Serengeti sometimes does remind us of the American prairie, but in truth it can’t be compared with any other place on earth. Its kopje-dotted landscape, its vast and billowing skies, and especially its astounding wealth of wildlife make it one-of-a-gorgeous-kind. Flying via Nairobi and Arusha, we reach our base, Migration Camp, on the hippo-haven Grumeti River. Known for its superb tents (which, one traveller wrote, “have only one thing in common with normal tents: canvas”) and its dramatic setting in rocky outcrops, Migration Camp is revered for its tranquility (something of a Serengeti specialty).

We take a picturesque flight from the Serengeti to Lake Manyara, then drive to our base for the next three nights, the lovely Cape Dutch style cottages and suites of the Manor at Ngorongoro, set mellifluously in an Arabica coffee estate next to the Ngorongoro Conservation Area. And then we’ll wend our scenic way up from the Manor to the rim of one of earth’s wonders, the great, green, animal-nurturing caldera of a once catastrophically cranky, now beneficently mellow volcano, the Ngorongoro.

We’re at Vail and Aspen altitudes of well over 7,000 feet, and being up that high, figuratively and actually, we may recall Isak Dinesen’s words in Out of Africa, “The air of the African highlands went to my head like wine, I was all the time slightly drunk with it.” And then we zoom down to the Lost World’s lush and park-like floor (but which, make no mistake, is an animal, not a human, kingdom) for a day’s game viewing and a festive bush picnic.

And we’ll game drive and view-catch at Lake Manyara, which our guy Ernest Hemingway thought “the loveliest lake in Africa.” The lake is a birder’s heaven, (it’s frequented by 300 migratory species), and the water from its Crater Highlands–supplied springs makes it a forested redoubt for all the most glamourous large mammals, including the famed Manyara tree-climbing lions. (It’s a little irreverent, but tree-lounging might be a better description.)

We affectionately say goodbye to the great crater and fly to Nairobi, where we’ll rest up – with our Safari Director and vehicle on call – at a full-service, meals-included day room at the Four Points by Sheraton with some time to shop, or just kick back and savour the first, fresh memories of a classic African safari. We will be escorted to the airport and through check-in for our late evening flights.

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