This trip links four places across Kenya and Tanzania over ten nights. It opens in Nairobi, a highland capital where savannah runs up against the suburbs, then settles for four nights in the Maasai Mara’s Naboisho Conservancy, where the rules allow off-road driving and drives after dark. From there it crosses into Tanzania and the remote Soit le Motonyi plains of the eastern Serengeti, big-cat country kept quiet for years, before closing on the rim of the Ngorongoro Crater.
You travel by a mix of light aircraft and 4×4, with unhurried game drives shaping the days and long, uninterrupted sightings the point in the conservancy and on the eastern plains. Each stay is a small tented camp or residence chosen for its ground and its guiding, from an art-led home in Nairobi to a rim camp that puts you among the first vehicles onto the crater floor.
Your first night is in Nairobi, a highland capital at around 1,795 metres where daytime temperatures sit between 18 and 26 degrees, a comfortable place to rest before hotter, lower country. Hemingways Eden is a nine-room art-led residence on the forested Karen-Langata edge, built in 1992 as a painter's family home and now full of original canvases, bronzes and hand-formed ceramics. It borders the Giraffe Sanctuary forest, indigenous woodland that shelters more than 200 species of bird.
From Nairobi you continue to the Mara Naboisho Conservancy for four nights. Conservancy rules cap the vehicles at any sighting to four at most and allow off-road driving, drives after dark and walking, and lion densities across Naboisho are high, so sightings of lion, leopard and cheetah hold through the year rather than clustering into one season. Between July and October wildebeest and zebra from the Serengeti reach the Mara. Ol Seki stands on a hilltop above the Isupukiai River Valley with 270-degree views; its rebuilt tents open to the plains, and giraffes, zebras and elephants use the waterhole below the deck.
You cross into Tanzania and the remote Soit le Motonyi plains of the eastern Serengeti for three nights, big-cat country closed to visitors for close to two decades to protect its cheetahs. Vehicle numbers stay low and sightings run long and unhurried, with lion, cheetah, leopard and serval working the short grass and the acacia belts and rocky kopjes along the Ngare Nanyuki river valley. The camp puts its weight behind guiding, and a sighting runs as long as it needs. Olmara has eight tented suites within an ancient grove of acacias, three of them carrying stargazing platforms where a bed can be made up under the open sky.
From the Serengeti you reach the rim of the Ngorongoro Crater for two nights, a collapsed volcanic caldera whose floor supports a resident community of around 25,000 large mammals. A stay is built around one early descent onto the floor, with a picnic breakfast and lunch carried down, putting you on the ground in first light before the traffic arrives; all of the Big Five can turn up within a single morning, the black rhino among them. At roughly 2,300 metres the evenings turn cold. Sanctuary Crater Camp has ten tented suites in acacia forest on the rim, close to the descent road, with closed 4x4s and a hot-water bottle in the bed at night.
Ed Charles, BBC Producer
Fitzroy are true specialists in accessing the wilderness. They know where to go and importantly, when to go there. Highly recommended.
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our approach
Every journey starts with a conversation. We take the time to understand your vision before we start planning.
Whether by phone or in person, we work with you directly to shape something that is considered, personal, and expertly delivered.
Every journey starts with a conversation. We favour a direct, personal approach: understanding your vision before anything else.
Whether by phone or in person, we work with you directly to shape a journey that is both thoughtfully considered and expertly delivered.
Get in touch to start planning yours.
