Top Family Safari Experiences

Safari travel, for many Micato guests, is more than life-affirming. It can be life-changing—filled with extraordinary moments that offer a galvanizing sense of connection with wild nature, other communities, and fellow-travellers.

Which is why a safari with family can be such a profound experience.

Encountering Africa’s spectacular landscapes, cultures, and creatures—whether for the first or the tenth time—offers countless opportunities to share such moments with loved ones. Spotting your first wild lions alongside your parents; taking in the vast African night sky beside your spouse; meeting Maasai warriors and Nairobi schoolchildren with your own kids—all of these have the potential to create indelible memories. As do so many of the other daily pleasures of a Micato safari: sunrise balloon rides and evening campfires; exploring the savannah on foot, mountain bike or horseback; delicious barbecue meals and relaxing time at your safari lodges’ swimming pools.

But as a family-owned company, we at Micato like to go beyond in helping our travellers find inspiration with their nearest and dearest. We also subscribe to a centuries-old Kenyan adage, Jamii ndiyo msingi wa kila kitu—“family is the foundation of everything.”

So we’ve put together a collection of truly exceptional family-safari experiences, including the following:

1. Learning about early humankind from true experts

If your clan is interested in Indiana Jones-style exploration, Micato arranges private excursions in Kenya’s Turkana Basin with the world’s preeminent paleoanthropologists, the Leakeys. You’ll visit dig sites, inspect fossils with Louise Leakey and her knowledgeable team of field scientists, and get an in-depth immersion in human history in the very place where it began.

2. Trekking to visit endangered mountain gorillas

Singular among the wildlife encounters Micato offers is the chance to come face-to-face with Rwanda’s majestic, critically endangered mountain gorillas. Since only about 1,000 of these apes still exist in the wild, watching them at close range as they groom and forage and play with their young is an experience only a handful of people in the world have shared. Your family members could be among them. (Please note: Only children over 15 are allowed on gorilla treks, which can be strenuous.)

3. Quad biking through vast open landscapes

If speeding on an ATV across miles of wild, empty desert sounds like your family’s kind of good time, Micato offers rip-roaring fun on Botswana’s Makgadikgadi Pans. Once the site of an ancient lake, the pans now stretch for 600 flat, wide-open square miles—perfect terrain for riotous quad-bike racing, and (no joke) gazing at the horizon and seeing the actual curvature of the earth. By special arrangement, your family’s safari camp, minus the tent, can be moved to the pans for a night under jaw-dropping stars.

4. Engaging with orphaned elephants

As many Micato guests are aware, illegal poaching has posed continuing threats to Africa’s elephant population, leaving many young ellies without parents. So it can be deeply heartening to visit the nurseries where these orphans are being carefully and lovingly raised for their eventual return to wild herds. At both the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, in Nairobi, and Abu Camp, in Botswana, Micato lets you watch baby ellies up close as they frolic together, and snuggle and bottle-feed with their caretakers. You’ll also get to learn the orphans’ individual stories, and have the chance to sponsor your favourites.

5. Tracking rhinos with rangers (and hounds)

You and your family can take hands-on role in black rhino conservation by helping rhino trackers at Ol Jogi Wildlife Conservancy, in Kenya’s Laikipia Plateau. Each day, a cadre of ranger-trackers navigates the private reserve’s 58,000-acre expanse, using high-tech radio telemetry and a team of affable sniffer dogs to monitor the movements of 100 or so resident rhinos. Through Micato, you can join these jaunts, and see up close just what protecting these regal African beasts entails.

6. Sandboarding in the Suguta Valley

Sporty families can share an exhilarating experience together in one of Kenya’s remotest, driest, and most beautiful places: the Suguta Valley, whose giant, sculptural sand dunes you’ll have all to yourselves. Sandboarding—basically desert snowboarding, with boards that let you carve turns as you fly down the slopes—is something very few people have experienced here (or anywhere in the Rift Valley), but thanks to Micato’s deep-seated knowledge and connections in the area, you can.

7. Meeting Schoolchildren at Micato-AmericaShare Harambee Community Centre

Perhaps the most meaningful experience you can share on a Micato family safari is visiting the Micato-AmericaShare Harambee Community Centre in the heart of Nairobi’s Mukuru slum. Here, the libraries, computer labs, and educational and community outreach programmes—which have helped many thousands of children and their families—have been largely made possible by safari travellers like you. It is a powerful gift: getting to see the difference you have helped make in the lives of others.

Remember, since Micato specializes in creating Custom Safaris, we’d be delighted to build an itinerary around whatever special activities interest your loved ones. To learn more about what it’s like to take a family safari with Micato, read here. Or, to get started planning your own family adventure, contact one of our Safari Experts at 1-800-MICATO-1 (1-800-642-2861) or send us a message.