Kenya
The Birthplace of the Safari
Kenya is where the word safari first meant a journey. Between the snows of Mount Kenya and the flamingo lakes of the Great Rift Valley, the country folds highland forest, acacia savannah, and the rolling Mara grasslands into one long horizon — the landscape every safari since has been measured against. This is the Africa of Blixen’s highlands and Roosevelt’s game trails, still carrying more than a thousand bird species and the last great overland migration on earth. Guided Safaris® keeps its oldest addresses here: private conservancies beside the Masai Mara, sanctuaries on the Laikipia Plateau, and a Nairobi morning among orphaned elephants.
SIGNATURE GUIDED SAFARIS® LODGES
- Segera Retreat Laikipia
- Ol Donyo Lodge Chyulu Hills
- Mara Toto Tree Camp Masai Mara
- Mara Nyika Camp Masai Mara
- Segera House Laikipia
- Mara Plains Camp Masai Mara
- Arijiju Lodge Laikipia
- Giraffe Manor Nairobi
- Shompole Wilderness Rift Valley
“This is the country where the safari was born — and out on our private Mara conservancies, with the crowds a horizon away, it is still the greatest wildlife theater on earth”
The Mara · 1,500–2,180 m
The Masai Mara
The reserve made Kenya’s name; the private conservancies around it are where Guided Safaris® keeps its Mara. Along the northern boundary of the Masai Mara National Reserve, a ring of Maasai-owned conservancies — some 200,000 acres of private wilderness open only to camp guests — carries the same riverine forest and open grassland with a fraction of the vehicles. This is our private Mara camps country: Mara Plains on the Ntiakitiak River in the Olare Motorogi Conservancy, Mara Nyika in the 50,000-acre Naboisho Conservancy, Mara Toto tucked under the ancient ebony canopy. Game drives run by day and after dark here, led by Maasai guides and trackers who grew up reading this grass. The big cats are the headline — these conservancies hold some of the highest predator densities in Africa — but roughly 470 bird species keep the hours between drives just as rich.
“Up in this high air you breathed easily, drawing in a vital assurance and lightness of heart. In the highlands you woke up in the morning and thought: Here I am, where I ought to be” — Karen Blixen, Out of Africa
“Our private Mara camps sit in the path of two migrations — the Serengeti herds of the dry season, and the Loita wildebeest that pour off the northern plains when the grass turns green”
Mara River · July–October
The Great Migration
Every dry season, more than a million wildebeest walk out of the Serengeti and into Kenya — and the Mara River is the gate they must pass. From about July through October the herds mass on the banks, wildebeest and zebra in their hundreds of thousands, testing the current and turning back until one animal commits and the crossing becomes an avalanche. Crocodiles hold the deep channels, lion and spotted hyena work the far bank, and the dust hangs over the water long after the last animal has climbed out. The Mara is the migration’s stage because the rains keep its grass sweet when the southern plains have burned dry — and because the river gives the drama a bottleneck. Guided Safaris® guests watch from strategically chosen crossing sites reached out of the private conservancies, sharing the spectacle with a handful of vehicles rather than a hundred, across one of the longest crossing seasons in East Africa.
The land teems with beasts of the chase, infinite in number and incredible in variety — Theodore Roosevelt, African Game Trails
Nairobi · est. 1977
Sheldrick Wildlife Trust
Kenya’s most famous conservation story begins in a forest clearing at the edge of Nairobi, with a line of orphaned elephant calves trotting in for their milk. The Sheldrick Wildlife Trust — founded in 1977 by Dame Daphne Sheldrick in memory of David Sheldrick, the founding warden of Tsavo East — pioneered the hand-rearing of milk-dependent orphans and has raised more than 320 elephants back toward wild lives in Tsavo. Guided Safaris® arranges a private visit to the orphan program away from the public hour: unhurried time at the nursery with the Keepers who stay beside their calves around the clock, and each orphan’s rescue story told first-hand. Most guests leave having adopted a young calf of their own — a foster whose progress the Trust reports as it grows, graduates to the reintegration units, and one day walks back into the wild herds. It is the gentlest morning a Kenya journey can hold, and often its most lasting.
“Animals are indeed more ancient, more complex and in many ways more sophisticated than us… [T]hey should be respected and revered, but perhaps none more so than the elephant, the world’s most emotionally human land mammal” — Dame Daphne Sheldrick
The seasons
When to go
There is no closed season in the Mara — the equatorial highlands hold their spring-like weather through all twelve months. Days run warm, roughly 54–86°F, and nights at this altitude ask for a fleece on the morning drive. July through October is the classic window: the grass is grazed low, the Serengeti herds are in, and the river crossings are at their height. The short rains arrive in November and December — about four green weeks of dramatic skies, newborn game, and returning migrant birds. January and February dry out into a warm, quiet season that photographers favor for its clear light and big cats. The long rains fall from late March through May, six to eight weeks of afternoon storms that empty the plains of visitors and repaint them green — the season the Loita herds drift into the private conservancies, filling the grasslands without a crossing in sight. Start a conversation with our Guided Safaris® Chief designers, who time every Signature journey to the season’s own reward.
L’Ex-Libris — The 1923 Bookplate · Deboss & Foil
Pressed into the paper.
A bookplate pressed into cotton paper, its title stamped in gold leaf. Move your cursor across the plate: the foil catches the light only at the right angle, exactly as a stamped cover does when you tilt it.
Est. 1995
Guided Safaris®
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