About Me

I am the traveller behind Mama Mgeni - and after more than a decade of following the grass, the rains, and the light across Kenya, I write these stories the way I wish someone had written them for me before my first trip.

“Mama Mgeni” means, roughly, the welcoming host - the one who receives the guest. It is the name I was given by a camp cook near the Mara who decided, over the course of one long season, that I asked too many questions and cared too much about getting things right to be treated as an ordinary tourist. The name stuck. It is also, I think, the honest description of what I try to do here: receive you as a guest and hand you Kenya the way it was handed to me.

I did not grow up here. I came for two weeks and, in the way these things sometimes happen, simply never fully left. Over the years I have watched an elephant breathe outside my tent at 4:47 in the morning, cried at a river crossing, cycled alongside zebra in Hell's Gate, stood speechless beneath Kilimanjaro, and been comprehensively out-negotiated by a colobus monkey over a bread roll. Each of those moments is a story on this site.

What I write is not a brochure. I am not trying to sell you a package. These are honest, first-hand accounts of specific places - the Maasai Mara, Amboseli, Tsavo, Samburu, Lake Nakuru, the coast at Diani and Lamu, Mount Kenya, and Nairobi itself - written to tell you what a place actually feels like when you are standing in it, dust and all. Where I can, I name the guides who made the difference, because in Kenya the guide is usually the whole trip.

If you are planning your first safari, or your fifth, I hope these stories are useful, honest, and occasionally funny. Wake up early. Trust your guide. Take the five minutes when you need them. And when the elephant walks past your tent before dawn - try not to panic. It is fine. It is more than fine.