Day 1 - Depart home

En route to Kenya and its capital city, Nairobi.

Days 2 & 3 - Nairobi, cultural capital of Kenya

After landing in Nairobi, we’ll be escorted through the formalities by Micato staff and driven toHemingways, our jet-lag soothing hotel in one of the capital’s lushest suburbs. (Just another of the many Micato Differences: amazingly quick and smooth touchdown-to-hotel transitions.)

The next day we’ll mingle with the kids and elders at theMicato-AmericaShare Harambee Centre, and head over to the Giraffe Centre (where we’ll hand-feed endangered Rothschild giraffes) and the home of Karen Blixen, now a lovingly restored museum. In 1937, Baroness Blixen (under the pen name Isak Dinesen) publishedOut of Africa, which many of us consider the most heart-stirring book ever written about the continent. And after a leisurely lunch at one of Nairobi’s stylish restaurants, we’ll return to Hemingways, inspired by our first experiences of African hospitality, by good food and conversation, eager and ready to embark on a classic African safari.

Days 4 & 5 - Tsavo National Park, favoured stomping ground for The Big Five

It’s fitting that our first camp is in Tsavo, an archetype of all that brings us to Africa’s astounding game lands.The Big Fiveare in numerous residence, along with the myriad of animals and birds, almost infinite skies, long, golden reaches and million-year quiet that, as Isak Dinesen wrote, “sooth the homesick soul.”

We and our Safari Director make unfailingly exciting game drives based fromFinch Hattons Luxury Safari Camp, named for a man who held Tsavo close to his heart. Denys Finch Hatton, a charismatically jaunty British aristocrat was a pioneer of modern safari (and, as you may remember from the book or movie, was Isak Dinesen’s great and tragic love). Now part of Sir Richard Branson’s stellar Virgin Collection, Finch Hattons expertly combines deep respect for history and African culture with modernity and smilingly orchestrated luxury.

Days 6to8 - Maasai Mara, icon of the safari cosmos

We fly from Tsavo to the Maasai Mara, the northern reaches of the Maasai Mara-Serengeti ecosystem, the greatest assembly of wild (and wondrous) animals on planet Earth. The Mara abounds with rolling grasslands, expressive acacia trees, sweeping vistas teeming with wildlife, and the rock islands, called kopjes, that Peter Matthiessen called “magnificent, harmonious stone gardens…[revealing] the bone of Africa.” And then there is one of Africa’s common but unforgettable sights: “the cumulus clouds that drift all day long across a sun-filled sky,” as Elspeth Huxley wrote inThe Flame Trees of Thika, “remind[ing] me of huge swirls of whipped cream.”

While in the Mara, we’ll sweep in a hot-air balloon above these rolling grasslands (normally an additional cost, ballooning onEast Africa’s Golden Savannahsis part of the luxe experience). And at flight’s end, we’ll savour a champagne breakfast; we’ll already be a little giddied by the plain’s beauty and our good fortune to be so welcome and at ease in its presence.

Our camp,Mahali Mzuri, is another Richard Branson gem, a winner ofCondé Nast Traveler’s Reader’s Choice Awards for Favorite Safari Camp. It’s twelve innovatively designed tents and main lodge, connected by winsome walkways, are designed for full-tilt, reposeful luxury. (And, as we like to say, those tents resemble the common idea of “tent” about as much as a vintage Yugo resembles a Rolls-Royce Phantom).

Days 9to11 - Wonder of Africa, the Serengeti

Now south by air to the vast and fabled Serengeti, a place, wrote the great conservationist Bernhard Grzimek, “where you can feel the pulse of the Earth, the rhythm of life that has been playing out for millions of years.”

Our camp, theElewana Serengeti Explorer, the newest addition to Elewana’s superb collection of camps and lodges, sits in serene isolation on the Nyaboro Hills, overlooking the auric plains, which we roam freely, watching elephants make their mammoth rounds, cheetahs atop rocky kopjes, alert to every shifting molecule below, long, orderly lines of zebras and wildebeest as they trace their ancient migratory paths. We delight in hippos frolicking, fighting, and snoozing in waterholes, and gaze upward as mountainous afternoon clouds that pile up over the Ngorongoro Crater, our next stop on this eventful, revelatory safari.

Days 12 & 13 - Delving into Ngorongoro Crater

We fly to flamingo-thronged Lake Manyara, and drive up toNgorongoro Lodge Melia, a lovely, boutiquey sanctuary brightened by original African artwork and tremendous views. And from there we hop into our safari vehicles and wend our way a couple of thousand feet up, then thrillingly down into the Ngorongoro Crater, like Manyara, gigantic evidence of Africa’s eons-long splitting apart.

That tear in the earth’s surface has created the Great Rift Valley, a gargantuan parting of the ways of the Nubian Plate, which carries most of the continent, and the Somali Plate, on which fitfully rests most of far-eastern Africa. As one tectonic plate moves east, and one west, the slender (but sometimes very deep) Rift Lakes are formed — Tanganyika, Turkana, and Manyara among many — along a 4,000-mile-long fracture. And an unimaginable grinding creates volcanoes like Kilimanjaro and Mount Kenya, and, as we’ll see and experience today, the world’s largest intact caldera, a 100-square-mile, 2000-foot-deep bowl, all that’s left of a mountain that, before a stupendous explosion a couple of million years ago, rivaled Kilimanjaro in grandeur.

Now peacefully at rest, Ngorongoro abounds with life and beauty. (It was unknown to the outside world until 1892, which which helps account for its wealth of wildlife, everything from a burgeoning lion population to fine strands of flamingos).

Day 14 - Return to Nairobi for flights home

After flying back to Nairobi, we’ll have day rooms–with full amenities– at theFour Points Nairobi Airportor the Norfolk before being escorted by our Safari Director for our late night flights home.

Day 15 - Homeward bound

Connect with your flights home and sweetly dream, perhaps, about your next Micato safari.