Explore Old Africa in Style
Such is Africa’s allure: that a bright fellow like Hemingway would lie in his tent, homesick before he’d even parted from a place that had come to seem more like home than home itself. We’re told these days to stick to the now, and the here, but Hemingway—like many of us lovers of Africa—knew that sometimes you can’t micromanage your passions. The Hemingway Wing Safari—a cherished favourite of Micato staff—is a tribute, not only to Africa’s tendency to grab hold of our hearts, but also to the old-fashioned and cozy safaris of Hemingway’s time, with three tented camps (a little more luxurious than in Ernest’s day, but he was never one to avoid intelligently offered luxury), good looks at East Africa’s most legendary game parks (and a couple of lesser-known gems), and five swooping flights that bring us into great intimacy with Africa’s landscapes.
Explore Old Africa in Style
Such is Africa’s allure: that a bright fellow like Hemingway would lie in his tent, homesick before he’d even parted from a place that had come to seem more like home than home itself. We’re told these days to stick to the now, and the here, but Hemingway—like many of us lovers of Africa—knew that sometimes you can’t micromanage your passions. The Hemingway Wing Safari—a cherished favourite of Micato staff—is a tribute, not only to Africa’s tendency to grab hold of our hearts, but also to the old-fashioned and cozy safaris of Hemingway’s time, with three tented camps (a little more luxurious than in Ernest’s day, but he was never one to avoid intelligently offered luxury), good looks at East Africa’s most legendary game parks (and a couple of lesser-known gems), and five swooping flights that bring us into great intimacy with Africa’s landscapes.
Day 1: En route to a classic East African safari
We board our flight and enjoy the anticipation of Africa.
Days 2 & 3:Getting acquainted with Nairobi
We’ll be met by our Micato Safari Director and whisked away to the Fairmont Norfolk Hotel or the equally welcoming Kempinski Villa Rosa. We’ll visit the Giraffe Centre and the illuminating National Museum, pay our respects at the newly renovated home of Karen Blixen (who, Hemingway said more than once, should have received the Nobel Prize for literature instead of him)
Days 4 & 5:The Laikipia Plateau
We fly north from Nairobi to the Laikipia Plateau. It’s a short, but momentous flight,
taking us from Nairobi’s urban whirl to a vast, animal-abounding wilderness graced with views
of the more-than-iconic Mount Kenya and the monumental clouds that seem to drift up from its 17,000-foot summit. We are, gleefully, in the Africa we’ve been carrying around in our imagination since we were children.
Our haven in this marvelous world-of-its-own is the excellent Mutara Camp, set high atop a cliff overlooking the Plateau, and the only camp (or lodge or pretty much any modern artifact) in the 20,000-acre Mutara Conservancy, a fruitful partnership between the local people and Mutara’s diligently eco- and heritage-aware owners. Spiraling down from the clifftop, we make game drives in Laikipia, encountering in solitude its fabulous plentitude of large (and cunningly small) mammals (all the Big Five, including some especially svelte leopards) who are just the headliners in a fabulous cast of very natural, very intriguing characters. (Some travellers, having seen and appreciated the Big Five, begin a more difficult search for the Little Five, whose identities we will divulge in Tanzania Spectacular.)
Days 6 & 7:The Maasai Mara’s famed Fairmont Mara Safari Club
South by air to the Maasai Mara, the northern reaches of the Serengeti–Maasai Mara ecosystem, earth’s richest wildlife habitat. Our base for explorations in the fabled Mara is the Fairmont Mara Safari Club, recently voted among the Top 20 in Travel+Leisure’s consequential World’s Best Hotels list.>br>
Surrounded on three sides by the life-giving Mara River, the Mara Safari Club is a masterpiece of appropriate and generously luxurious design. And it’s a great jumping-off place for extraordinary game drives in the mixed land- and waterscapes of the Mara. We’ll visit a traditional Maasai village as we wend our way through this natural wonderland, the kind of place that moved Hemingway to write, “I loved this country and I felt at home and where a man feels at home, outside of where he’s born, is where he’s meant to go.”
Days 8 & 9 :Gazelles by the gazillions on the golden Serengeti
“How can one convey the power of Serengeti?” asked Cyril Connolly in The Evening Colonnade. “It is an immense, limitless lawn, under a marquee of sky. . . .The light is dazzling, the air delectable; kopjes rise out of the grass at far intervals, some wooded; the magic of the American prairie here blends with the other magic of the animals as they existed before man.”
The Serengeti sometimes does remind us of the American prairie, but in truth it can’t be compared with any other place on earth. Its kopje-dotted landscape, its vast and billowing skies, and especially its astounding wealth of wildlife make it one-of-a-gorgeous-kind. Flying via Nairobi and Arusha, we reach our base, Migration Camp, on the hippo-haven Grumeti River. Known for its superb tents (which, one traveller wrote, “have only one thing in common with normal tents: canvas”) and its dramatic setting in rocky outcrops, Migration Camp is revered for its tranquility (something of a Serengeti specialty).
Days 10 to 12:Exquisite Lake Manyara and the Ngorongoro Crater
We take a picturesque flight from the Serengeti to Lake Manyara, then drive to our base for the next three nights, the quietly spectacular Ngorongoro Lodge Melia, perched handsomely on the rim of one of earth’s wonders, the great, green, animal-nurturing caldera of a once catastrophically cranky, now beneficiently mellow volcano, the Ngorongoro. Up-to-the-minute modern–with a spa, gym, lovely and quietly ambitious restaurant, and what must be one of the planet’s most felicitously placed infinity pools–the Melia heartfully and artfully mixes luxury with deep respect for African tradition.
We’re at Vail and Aspen altitudes of well over 7,000 feet, and being up that high, figuratively and actually, we may recall Isak Dinesen’s words in Out of Africa, “The air of the African highlands went to my head like wine, I was all the time slightly drunk with it.” And then we zoom down to the Lost World’s lush and park-like floor (but which, make no mistake, is an animal, not a human, kingdom) for a day’s game viewing and a festive bush picnic.
And we’ll game drive and view-catch at Lake Manyara, which our guy Ernest Hemingway thought “the loveliest lake in Africa.” The lake is a birder’s heaven, (it’s frequented by 300 migratory species), and the water from its Crater Highlands–supplied springs makes it a forested redoubt for all the most glamourous large mammals, including the famed Manyara tree-climbing lions. (It’s a little irreverent, but tree-lounging might be a better description.)
Days 13 & 14:Nairobi and homeward bound
We affectionately say goodbye to the great crater, lake, and deliciously homey Manor, and fly to Nairobi, where we’ll rest up in day rooms at the historic Norfolk or the Four Points by Sheraton at the Nairobi Airport before our late evening flights.
Camps & Lodges
Ngorongoro Coffee Lodge
The Grand Safari’s six flights make travel between game preserves and luxury camps a seamless, time-saving joy. And our stays in places like the airy Tortilis Camp in Amboseli; Bateleur or Governor’s Il Moran camps in the Maasai Mara; the charming luxe Four Seasons Safari Lodge or Grumeti Serengeti River Lodge in the Serengeti; and, of course,
Includes:
- Spectacular hot air balloon safari followed by a champagne breakfast upon descent.
- Luxury accommodations and all meals.
- 24/7 Concierge Team poised to meet last minute, unexpected, and unusual requests.
- Every last gratuity, even substantial ones to driver-Guides, waiters, porters… and everyone else, from beginning to end of your safari.
- Regional wine and beer at mealtimes, vehicles stocked with soft drinks and bottled water.