These African Safaris Were Unlike Any I’d Done Before

Perhaps the toughest question you can ask a travel writer is, “What’s the best place you’ve been?” At some point, the highlight reel of trips tends to blend and blur. So many special moments are shunted aside for new ones. Rare become the true “pinch me” moments you know you won’t forget.

This past month, I was lucky enough to have a slew of those while on a safari trip arranged by Stanley Safaris, a company that specializes in bespoke luxury safaris. I’d been on safaris in South Africa, Botswana, and Uganda and seen the Big Five (lion, leopard, elephant, buffalo and rhino), so when planning the trip with Shaun Stanley, the company’s owner, I stressed that I wanted something a little different from the trips I’d been on. I didn’t know what kind of different, just that I wanted to walk away feeling like I didn’t have the same types of experiences as before.

The more we talked about it, the more my preferences came down to two things: I didn’t want to spot wildlife with tons of other vehicles, and I didn’t want the monotonous routine of day after day of game drives. I wanted some way of mixing things up.

The itinerary Stanley Safaris put together did just that. My trip started at the unique and intimate Manzili House in Kenya. Designed by a French expat heavily inspired by Swahili architecture found on the ultra-chic Kenyan island of Lamu, it is made up of just two cream-colored houses surrounding a pool in a walled garden. Getting to game-rich parts of Africa can be a brutal journey, and this selection served both as a much-needed respite as well as kicking off the trip at a hidden gem of a hotel.

Relatively recharged, our second day kicked off with a short drive to the domestic airport to get on a small plane to fly north of Nairobi to the other side of Mount Kenya to our first game lodge–Lewa Wilderness.

The lodge is nestled in a valley above a river, and on the opposite rise, a steady stream of rhinos, giraffes, zebras, gazelles, and more make cameos throughout the day. The lodge is made up of an elegant colonial-style manse and individual thatched villas are splayed across the edge, as well as a gym, open-air dining room, stone-and-wood living room, and pool deck. We stayed at the Hillside Suite, which sits at the edge of the property and has uninterrupted views of the wild conservancy. It has a private pool, a living room with elegant organic architectural elements, and a fireplace.

As luxurious and inviting as the environs were, the real “pinch-me” moments came on our two game drives while in Lewa, as they were two of the most incredible I’ve ever experienced. So much so that I felt obliged to tell my friend, who had never been on safari before, that it wasn’t normal to see game after essentially every turn in the road. On the first drive, we spotted the elusive black rhino within minutes as well as several endangered Grévy’s zebras. They’re the ones with the Mickey Mouse ears and thinner stripes. They also tend to be loners, a nonsensical idea in the theoretically rational natural world, thus making them easy prey in the meat grinder that is the African wild. Lewa has the largest population in the world of these quirky creatures.

A bull elephant detached from a grazing herd and swaggered up to our vehicle, pausing now and then to assess before stopping mere paces away. Convinced by our frozen demeanor that we bore no ill will, he eventually sauntered away, but it took a lot longer for my heart to slow down. On that same drive, we saw giraffes, waterbuck, more herds of elephants, and a gorgeous tawny eagle perched on a sparse tree a few feet away.

At sunset, a pride of lions was found lounging on a rocky outcropping. Adult females and a couple of young males lazed about, with the occasional roughhousing interrupting the somnolent mood. Then, just as our guide revved the engine to head home, a young male, unaware of the adage about cats and curiosity, padded up to our vehicle. He stopped, stared, and padded closer. We all found ourselves stock still yet again, as the young male moved non-threateningly to a mere couple of feet away. The driver shifting the car into drive had the lion springing away, but our nighttime drive back to the lodge was filled with the entertainment of the lions playfully trailing and criss-crossing in front of our vehicle as it traversed a rocky stretch of road.

Lewa is famous for one animal in particular, though, and that’s the rhino. There are an estimated 273 rhinos here, a whopping 12% of Kenya’s total, and that number is almost evenly split between the docile behemoths that are white rhinos and the mean yet skittish compact brawlers that are black rhinos. The following morning, our game drive saw so many rhinos it was almost hard to believe, given how sparse they often are at other locations. Leaving a grove of trees where a dozen of them were munching away, we exited to a couple of white rhinos by the side of the road. Utterly uninterested in us, they didn’t move despite us being, yet again, mere feet away. It’s hard to articulate the immensity of these animals so close to you, but it’s moments like this that make it hard to ever want to step foot in a zoo again.

After a quick tour of the rhino center, where guides run guests through the array of methods used to protect these imperiled animals, it was back to the dirt airstrip and another small plane to go north to Ol Malo.

While at Lewa, we had our meals alongside a group of luxury travel advisors who specialized in African safaris. We walked them through our itinerary, and to a person, they gushed about Ol Malo, declaring it something unique and special in the panoply of safari experiences. My request to Stanley Safaris for something outside the traditional game drive routine would be satisfied, they assured me.

After a rocky and rolling hour-plus drive through a wild landscape, we arrived at Ol Malo from the airstrip. Walking down its densely planted paths is to experience this unique lodge slowly reveal itself. Set on the literal edge of a plain that drops down into a valley, the siting of this private complex is one of the most spectacular I’ve ever seen. The villas are done in that splendid organic style, with sweeping 180-degree views of the valley below and mountains beyond. Mine had a heart-shaped bathtub on one of its terraces. The signature spot in the lodge is the green-tiled infinity pool, which might be one of the most arresting I’ve been fortunate to lounge around. So breathtaking that on our last day, we sheepishly told the owners we’d rather spend the afternoon relaxing and soaking in the landscape than heading off on another excursion.

Game drives are an option at Ol Malo, but the premise here is that you come for something different than other lodges. The owners are a bit “chopper mad,” and one of Ol Malo’s signature experiences, if you can afford it, are helicopter rides across northern Kenya. I’m borderline terrified of helicopters, so I didn’t do it. Not only are they supposed to be epic, but the excursions have cute hooks like landing on top of a mountain for sundowners. Instead, we took the lodge up on its other options, from a sunset hike down from the lodge and across the valley to climb a granite monolith to horseback riding on the plain above, where we got close to creatures ranging from oryx to giraffes. While many lodges offer “authentic” experiences with locals, Ol Malo offered us something far removed from the controlled environs of those curated experiences–a day trip to a fair for the Samburu people in the surrounding region. We were the only foreigners there as purveyors hawked their beaded works, weapons, goats, cows, and various other goods that hundreds of men and women had come from far to browse.

Breakfast and lunch here are casual affairs, but dinners are borderline magical and rotate around different spots of the property. One night it’s by candlelight in a small garden, another it’s in a rustic living room on couches surrounded by generations of the family’s knick-knacks that makes you feel like you’ve spent a day hunting big game.

One morning, we rode down to a knoll overlooking the river gorge where the staff set up breakfast under a tree. One of the more distinctive experiences when on safari is that you’ll have spells that are uncomfortable or dragging–like me riding the camels down to breakfast–and you start to wonder what you were thinking when you signed up. Then, you turn a corner and something unforgettable happens, which that morning was two male impalas in a full-fledged brawl, sprinting at each other repeatedly, the thwack of their crashing antlers ringing up the hillside.

Another “pinch me” moment.

As far as travel experiences go, African safaris remain, for lack of a better word, iconic. But they can be incredibly varied depending on where you go and what you want to see. But at their core, you want to see wild animals in a beautiful landscape without too many other people around. You also probably want to stay somewhere nice, given the roughness of a lot of the trip, and with guides who are knowledgeable, enthusiastic, and skilled. And given how much they often cost (typically thousands per person), it’s well worth your time to know what you want to experience.

And who knows, maybe you’ll end up with a few “pinch me” moments of your own.