Samburu: Where Kenya Gets Strange and Beautiful in the Best Possible Way
I am going to say something that might sound like a complaint but is in fact a compliment: Samburu National Reserve is deeply weird. Not in a bad way. In the way that certain places are when they have evolved in isolation and produced things that exist nowhere else – a Galapagos quality, an ecological […]
Standing at the Foot of Kilimanjaro: My Amboseli Experience and Why the Views Wrecked Me
There is a photograph taken of me on my third morning in Amboseli that I look at whenever I need reminding why I travel. In it, I am standing beside our Land Cruiser, one hand shielding my eyes from the early sun, looking up at something out of frame. My mouth is open. My guide […]
Cycling Hell’s Gate National Park Kenya: Safari Without a Vehicle | Mama Mgeni
The Red Elephants of Tsavo: A Drive Through Kenya’s Wildest and Most Underrated Park
Everyone who has been to Kenya has an opinion about Tsavo, and the opinions are almost never neutral. Either they will tell you it is too big, too dry, too remote – or they will tell you it is the most extraordinary place they have ever put a tyre into and that everywhere else felt […]
My First Morning in the Maasai Mara: Why Nothing Could Have Prepared Me for This
I remember sitting upright at 4:47 a.m. in a canvas tent somewhere in the middle of the Mara and thinking, for a brief second, that I had made a terrible mistake. It was pitch black outside. Something was moving – slow, heavy footsteps that shook the ground ever so slightly – maybe thirty metres away […]