13 DAYS BEST OF KENYA & TANZANIA

We fly south this morning over the Athi Plains to the natural wonderland of Amboseli National Park. Mount Kilimanjaro, the still-glaciated monarch of Africa, presides over Amboseli, thrusting three dizzying miles above the park’s grasslands. As Peter Matthiessen wrote in The Tree Where Man Was Born, “A snow peak in the tropics draws the heart to a fine shimmering painful point of joy.”

Tortilis Camp is our base for game drives in this almost incomparably rich animal kingdom. Our spacious, luxuriously furnished, thatch-covered tents nestle under the huge and reposeful Tortilis acacia trees from which the camp takes its name. Unwinding on our veranda, we might, like Isak Dinesen, watch a parade of elephants “pacing along as if they had an appointment at the end of the world.”

Today we’ll fly through Nairobi and up North to Mt. Kenya Safari Club in Nanyuki.

For the past 50-odd years (ever since actor William Holden and some of his hunting buddies founded it), the Mount Kenya Safari Club—now part of the Fairmont collection—has been a magnet for just about every safariing nabob.

Along with stunning views of Mount Kenya, the club offers tennis; trout fishing; croquet; horsebacking; walking in gardens bubbling with exuberant tropical flowers; visits to nearby game reserves; and some of the most satisfying dining in either hemisphere (the club straddles the equator and so occupies both the Northern and the Southern Hemispheres at a salutary 7,000 feet above sea level).

This morning we’ll fly over the planetary rumple of the Great Rift Valley—it makes “the Grand Canyon look like a line scratched with a toothpick,” John Gunther wrote in Inside Africa—to the Maasai Mara, the northern sector of the bigger-than-Belgium Serengeti–Maasai Mara ecosystem, unquestionably the earth’s greatest haven for large mammals, more than 70 species of which go about their business in the oceanic Serengeti–Maasai Mara grasslands.

Enjoy the luxurious Bateleur Camp and gamedrives throughout the Mara, make side trips to the Mara River and its tributaries for a gander at leviathan crocodiles and hippos.

We fly to the Serengeti via Nairobi and Arusha, Tanzania. Three million or more large mammals—Elephants, cheetahs, gazelles by the gazillions, wildebeest, zebras, giraffes “floating across the plain” (thanks, Ms. Dinesen), lions, rhinos, and going on 60 more species— inhabit the great grassland, its riverine forests, and bustling, set-piece kopjes, rock islands that pop up from the plain.

Grumeti is a chic, 10-tent camp set along the banks of an oxbow lake, bustling with stunningly sizable crocs and hippos, always heftier than we remember. These are the kinds of African places that we love to introduce our guests to, places that seduce us into slowing down.

Today, after the sumptuous breakfast at the Grumeti Camp, you will be transferred to the nearby Grumeti Airstrip for your flight to Lake Manyara. You will be met at the Airstrip and transferred to Ngorongoro Crater Lodge, perched on the rain-forested rim of the Ngorongoro Crater, one of our solar system’s greatest geographic ornaments.

Today one sees the Hippos with wonder, encircled by steep walls.” Indeed, meandering around the softly lush caldera floor, we may feel like Professor George Edward Challenger and Lord John Roxton in Arthur Conan Doyle’s thriller The Lost World. True, we won’t see any Aardonyxes or Zupaysauri, but—as we often say—once you’ve really looked at a rhino, or contemplated the gigantic unlikeliness of an elephant, your old sadness at never having seen a dinosaur will be lightened.