We are off into the blue as our helicopter catches air and the sound of Garth Brooks fills our Bose headphones. “One of my Texas playlists,” remarks our sandy-haired pilot, Ben Simpson. His frontier-breaking helicopter safaris take travelers (among them George W. Bush) from Ethiopia’s Danakil Depression to the forests of eastern Congo. But this time, he’s working closer to home: Laikipia, in Kenya’s central highlands, where Simpson has lived for 18 years.
The dirty skies of Nairobi recede as we fly 45 minutes north from the capital, past the cloud-ringed peak of Mount Kenya to the golden savanna of the Lewa Wildlife Conservancy, which contains roughly 12 percent of all Kenya’s rhinoceros. To Lewa’s northwest lies the Laikipia Plateau—a tapestry of farms, Maasai cattle encampments, and private ranches alongside swaths of land that have been turned over to wildlife conservation. We fly over Simpson’s house, a glass-and-stone bungalow set on a rock where 22 elephant broke into his garden the week before, then tip deeper into the plateau’s wilds, spotting a herd of reticulated giraffe—of the estimated 4,700 that remain, around 30 percent are in Laikipia—and a black rhino, its calf trotting behind.
You won’t see rhino in these concentrations in the Maasai Mara, says my seatmate, Alice Daunt, a husky-voiced London-based travel agent with an elite client list, referring to southern Kenya’s most iconic game reserve. “What the Mara was to grand tourists 20, 30 years ago, this patch of northern Kenya is to the next generation.” Our trip will cover not only the great game in the area, but several privately owned lodges, including a new rental, Arijiju, which Daunt bills as the most beautiful bush home in Africa.
This is my fourth visit to the region, where mingling with its main players—opinionated, hard-living Kenyans, from bush pilots to architects and entrepreneurs—makes you feel you’ve gained entrée to some kind of elite members’ club. Here, I find the frontier romance of Karen Blixen but also the grit that drew me to Africa in the first place: that seductive feeling of mischief as the campfire embers fade to black. Instead of the sanitized, orchestrated approach of Africa’s many luxury lodges that have co-opted the cues of the old colonial lifestyle, these eclectic homesteaders are pioneering progressive models of conservation and creating safari experiences that overflow with heart. “Savvy conversation, passionate conservation, and a massive capacity for adventure,” Daunt says. “That’s what the scene up here is all about.”
This mix has been attracting major attention. Last April, when the Russian media giant Evgeny Lebedev hosted a summit on elephant protection, attracting global celebrities, philanthropists, and three African presidents, Laikipia was the venue. When Prince William chose Tusk Trust as his first conservation charity, Lewa was the major beneficiary; it is said that here on the flanks of Mount Kenya is where he proposed to Kate, in a log cabin with a simple quilt-covered bed.
For a week, Simpson’s helicopter will be our key to the kingdom. We left Nairobi at breakfast; now we’re at Ol Jogi Wildlife Conservancy, settling in for lunch above a salt lick where Grévy’s zebra feed alongside spear-horned oryx. Against a backdrop of acacia trees, the outdoor dining table is decorated with grand bronzes of rhino and elephant. I can’t help but tip over my plate to see what it is (Hermès). When I sip my sauvignon blanc, my arm nearly drops with the weight of the goblet’s solid-pewter stem cast in the shape of a giraffe. Jamie Gaymer, Ol Jogi’s conservation manager, smiles. “Welcome to Ol Jogi,” he says.
In the late 1970s, a trust set up by the Wildenstein family created Ol Jogi Ranch, piecing together 58,000 acres of contiguous land. It was where the late Alec Wildenstein, Sr. (of the French art-dealing and horse-racing dynasty) built his eccentric fiefdom, complete with a swimming pool, tennis court, stables, hammam, and seven cottages. His first wife, Jocelyn, infamous for plastic surgery that made her resemble the big cats she admired, decorated the home. The Wildensteins outfitted the cottage windows with curved glass from France.
There is ebony furniture, custom-made Lalique lamps, dark-wood antiques, and a drawing room dominated by raging lions leaping out of 19th-century European paintings. Ol Jogi’s sunken bathtubs and leopard-print carpets are a very long way from my personal taste, but that doesn’t matter. The service is pin sharp without being stuck-up, and everything I touch—silk bed canopies, silver place settings—is of far higher quality than what you’d find in a hotel. But most of all, the landscape thrums, its grandeur opening up when we chopper out from Ol Jogi’s front lawn into the property’s lake-filled hinterland.
In Ol Jogi’s special unit for recovering orphaned animals, we bottle-feed a five-month-old rhino; later, we track elephant and meet with antipoaching rangers. I find myself admiring rather than judging Alec Junior, who, along with his sister, Diane, has managed Ol Jogi since their father died in 2008. “It doesn’t matter who my family are; what matters is the conservation legacy,” he says. Instead of smashing the china in shame at his parents’ extravagance, he’s thrown open the doors to renters to help pay for the two million dollars a year the siblings sink into security and protecting the wildlife, including 75 rhino. “The rhino give us a focus,” says Gaymer, who oversees a ranger force of 130, including a 30-man rapid-response unit made up of Kenya National Police Reservists. “That means we have [personnel with] the authority to carry and use automatic weapons.”
Guns and fences. That’s the reality of the conservation game circa 2017; it’s not all romance, even if Ol Jogi’s material seductions start to make me feel otherwise. But this tension between risk and beauty goes to the heart of why this terrain resonates so deeply. In recent months, and especially in the run-up to August’s general election, parts of this region have grown decidedly edgy. There have been land invasions into Laikipia County’s western reaches from marauding, politically motivated cattle herders from the north, who have overrun private property and even burned down a tourist lodge. Elsewhere, herders have crept over the usual boundaries in desperate need of grass as dry-season conditions put pressure on their livestock. In spite of these threats, though, I can’t separate my deep feeling for this land from my fundamental belief that tourism is an engine for meaningful conservation, that risk is a personal choice. Let havoc prevail, and the elephants will go first.
Mount Kenya's sharp profile cuts against a clear African sky as I sit on the veranda at Segera Retreat, the 50,000-acre ranch that neighbors Ol Jogi. Segera’s German owner, the former CEO of Puma Jochen Zeitz, is in loose pants and a T-shirt; a guitar rests on a nearby table. This is his private home where he spends a third of the year, a modest farmstead hung with original Peter Beard prints. “The safari model of morning and evening drives—that’s not what it is here,” Zeitz says. “It has to always feel like a home to me and my family.” Zeitz is justifiably concerned about Laikipia’s issues with encroachment from cattle herds and tells me about new grazing models he is hoping to introduce, as well as investments the Zeitz Foundation has made in a Laikipia soccer league and an ethical fashion initiative launched in a nearby village, with Vivienne Westwood’s help (she stayed at Segera a few years back and fell in love with the native beading). “You can’t open a camp in a place like this and not engage with anything or anyone around it,” Zeitz says as I watch zebra from a beaten-up Adirondack chair.
Segera’s relaxed and authentic brand of luxury reveals itself as I settle in for a two-night stay. Sharing Zeitz’s garden are nine thatched guest villas and a pool surrounded by avant-garde sculptures and bougainvillea. The old stables are hung with contemporary African paintings (the much larger Zeitz Collection will soon occupy the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, opening in Cape Town this September). There are other guests staying here, including Nella Nencini-Hutchings, a California native turned bush pilot and guide, whose company, Tin Trunk Safari, caters to exactly the kind of intimate family groups that Segera suits so well.
“Laikipia has no faceless hotels,” she says as we eat fresh beet soup and organic salads beside the pool. “It’s private and real, so different from the Serengeti or the Mara.” Over drinks by the stables’ open fire, where Scotch is drunk with enthusiasm, I chat with Peterson Kamwathi, an up-and-coming Kenyan painter and beneficiary of Segera’s residency program for African artists. “I am expressing the anatomy of crowds,” he says about his work, “how groups can be more effective than individuals, their agenda more powerful and visible.” It’s a prescient conversation in view of the tensions that always seem to surface in Kenya around elections and droughts.
It's when we head east to Lewa Conservancy—technically outside Laikipia County, but still in the shadow of Mount Kenya—that I have some of the most animal-packed safari drives of my life: grazing rhino, lion basking in the sun, cheetah, a nursing herd of elephant. I stay at Elewana Kifaru House —one of the best-priced private rentals in Africa—and join sundowners at Lewa House, a lodge run by the extended family of Ian Craig, a Kenyan farmer and one of Africa’s most high-profile conservationists, who put Lewa on the map when he converted 40,000 acres of family land into a protected wildlife area in 1985. Both are a short ride from the more fashionable Sirikoi Lodge, where in campfire encounters one is quick to pick up on a scene that has echoes of the one I remember fondly at Lamu, off Kenya’s coast, before Somali kidnappers did their best to rip the heart out of the country’s bohemian beach scene in 2011 and 2012. There are pilots popping in on little red planes. There are two high-profile donors traveling with Will Jones, founder of the conservation organization Wild Philanthropy. There are guests who look as if they’ve bought out the entire collection of haute-hippie label Figue, their bush getups (Penelope Chilvers boots, Carolyn Roumeguere jewels) more elegant than the zippered Gore-Tex pants American travelers usually sport the moment they “go safari.” But if I’m looking at Laikipia in terms of its style quotient, then Arijiju has to be its apex.
I heard about this house from Ben Jackson, the so-called Brunelleschi of the Bush, who also built Simpson’s home and Segera. The low earth-toned building appears to be carved out of a hillside on the 32,000-acre Borana Conservancy, next to Lewa. To build this estate, Jackson oversaw 400 people on-site for 21 months, putting into place a grand scheme designed by the London architecture firm Michaelis Boyd. The result is a spectacular display of hand-hewn engineering, both serene and low-key, as if the extreme wealth that enabled Arijiju’s creation (a real estate deal that, according to Michael Dyer, who runs Borana, pumps $100,000 back into conservation each year) is also at peace with the world. The 65-foot infinity pool, where elephant come to drink, seems to reach out into the far distance of the Sieku Valley. Every detail—a vaulted arch here, a pegged scarf joint there—has been worked by artisans who understand the deeper textures of Laikipia.
“Sometimes I think I’d rather sleep on the roof,” says Jackson as he takes in the massive African sky. It’s not that he’s denigrating the Belgian linen and the copper roll-top bathtubs. He just understands the context in which Arijiju has evolved, how in this part of Africa it’s the smell of dust, not air-conditioning, that makes sense of the location.
It is a sentiment that Ian Craig defines more starkly when I finally meet him over dinner at Sirikoi House. The table glows under a chandelier of perforated ostrich eggshells. Craig has a rugged charm and piercingly intelligent eyes, but isn’t prone to frippery. He describes Laikipia as a fractured place, suffering from no central governance. As a result, he adds, “there are places in Laikipia that aren’t sustainable or safe for tourists.” And yet, counters Will Jones, who is also at the table, northern Kenya’s conservation success stories outweigh its challenges. “The new tourist isn’t coming to Africa expecting to see wildlife as a set tableau anymore,” he says. “They want to understand how wildlife can coexist with culture and community.”
Is it this passion for a cause that moves me? Perhaps. Or maybe it’s just the age-old romance of wild Africa, laced with a bit of that khaki fever Meryl Streep succumbed to as she slipped between the sheets with Robert Redford. There’s a term for it—mal d’Afrique. Up here in the shadow of Mount Kenya, I feel it more strongly than just about anywhere else on the continent.
The Best of Laikipia and Beyond ...
Travel specialist Alice Daunt and helicopter pilot Ben Simpson at Tropic Air Kenya co-designed my trip. A similar seven-night expedition, including helicopter transfers to and from Nairobi; nine hours of scenic heli-flying to Mount Kenya, the Matthews Range, and Suguta Valley; quad biking and fly-camping for a night in Sera Conservancy; and a fully inclusive stay at Arijiju costs around $19,500 per person for a family of five. The following lodges and private houses can also be stitched into a bespoke Laikipia itinerary:
Arijiju House
You can base yourself here—at Arijiju—for a week and mix up high-adrenaline helicopter forays with horseback riding and game drives. An excellent choice for someone who can’t stand bugs in the bathroom and is into daily spa treatments.
Enasoit
This is old-school Kenya: Little Enasoit Lodge occupies a bowl of magical land surrounded by the Lolldaiga Hills. The books are sun-bleached and dog-eared with love, and the animals congregate around water holes as if they know Enasoit’s owners will keep them safe.
Kifaru House
This Lewa-based bush home, called Elewana Kifaru House , sleeps up to 12 in six cottages. It’s not the area’s most style-conscious lodge, but the all-Kenyan staff gives it soul. The price—from $5,000 a night—is good value.
Ol Jogi
“This place was built for parties,” says Daunt. Ol Jogi's aesthetic is over the top, but you can also be sure that the money is going to serious rhino conservation.
Rutundu
The cozy log cabin Rutundu, where Prince William reportedly proposed to Kate Middleton, is 10,000 feet up the slopes of Mount Kenya. Cosmos, the caretaker, and his team are hidden away in the only other cabin nearby to rustle up meals or supplies.
Segera Retreat
For a modern aesthetic, Segera Retreat is probably the best bet in Laikipia. The lodge is overseen by a German manager who trained the Kenyan staff; service is among the best I’ve had in Africa. Little-known fact: It’s also home to the yellow biplane Gypsy Moth, from Out of Africa.
Sirikoi House
For families, I recommend the three-bedroom Sirikoi House. Be sure to get some air time with Sirikoi’s owner, Willie Roberts—one of Kenya’s great conservation mavericks. His stories reach back to the days when his father guided Prince Philip. S.R.
For high-level private guiding expertise in the region, contact Peter Silvester at Royal African Safaris.
Specialist donor trips oriented around conservation investment are run by Will Jones at Wild Philanthropy.
